Search Results for: Education

‘I Don’t Think Those Feelings of Self-Doubt Ever Go Away.’

Heather Weston / Henry Holt

Amy Brady | Longreads | April 2019 | 10 minutes (2,627 words)

The truth has never been a universally agreed upon concept. As most psychologists will tell you, a shift in perspective can alter how a situation feels as well as what it means. And most historians agree that the “truth” of any significant event changes depending on who’s telling the story.

In her astounding fifth novel Trust Exercise, Susan Choi plays with both perspective and narrative structure to tell the truth, or “truth,” about a group of suburban performing arts high school students. The book begins with Sarah, a fifteen year old in deep lust with her peer, David. Their friends, Karen and Joelle, and outcast Manuel, round out the teenage cast. Martin is a theater teacher from England who spends a couple of weeks at the high school, and Mr. Kingsley is their beloved theater teacher who makes the students participate in trust exercises usually reserved for older, more experienced actors. His questionable teaching style and Martin’s over-familiarity with the students are clues that the adults view the teens as both children and grown-ups, as needing guidance to navigate the professional world of acting but as also already possessing the emotional development needed to withstand the cruelty it bestows upon them.

As the novel unfolds, Choi captures the rage and lust of teenage life with thrilling verisimilitude. Who hasn’t felt the devastation of unrequited love as a horny fifteen year old? Or felt mistreated in a friendship? Or held a secret from a parent? Choi’s descriptions of her characters’ psychological interiors are equally adept: The teens walk assuredly into a classroom one moment, only to feel crushed by self-doubt the next, their self-confidence ruled by roiling hormones.

The novel’s authenticity is what makes both of its structural shifts, when they arrive, so shocking; the lives of these teens feel too real to be anything but the truth. But after each shift, everything in the story that came before is changed — changed but not entirely undone. It’s as if we had been reading the novel through a telescope only to be handed a kaleidoscope to finish it; the story’s pieces are all still there, but now they are arranged in different and surprising ways.

The shifts bring revelations about what the students endured from their teachers and parents and each other. Some of the revelations are amusing in their familiarity. Others are heartbreaking for the same reason. Trust Exercise is a novel that resonates with the #MeToo movement, but it’s also a story as old as time — it’s about those in power taking advantage of those who are powerless to stop them. Read more…

The Curious Tale of the Salish Sea Feet

Getty / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Kea Krause | LongreadsApril 2019| 16 minutes (3,905 words)

They come by way of similar discovery: A beachcomber, perhaps gathering shells or out for some exercise, spots a flashy, nonpelagic lump that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a human foot still nestled in its shoe. The feet, both lefts and rights, come in all sizes — sometimes wearing New Balance or Nike, occasionally a hiking boot, and sometimes still attached to leg bones, a tibia sticking out like a stake in the ground.

To the intrigue and often horror of Pacific Northwesterners, in 2007 feet began washing up along the shores of the Salish Sea, an inland ocean spanning nearly 500 miles from Olympia, Washington, the state’s capitol, to Desolation Sound, in British Columbia, Canada. Today the tally is 21 feet and counting (15 in BC, six in Washington). So prevalent are the gruesome discoveries that the BC coroner’s office has a map marked up with each new find: Foot #1 — a right — found in August 2007 floated up to Jedediah Island in a generic white sneaker with navy blue accents; Foot #5 in a muddy Nike; Foot #13 wore black with Velcro. New Year’s Day 2019 delivered the most recent foot, number 21, to a beach in Everett. It tumbled ashore in an aging boot, its condition indicating it had been out to sea for “some time,” according to local police.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon. Earned or not, the Pacific Northwest has a haunting prestige — the home of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, and Ted Bundy, and now also the land of Twilight’s Hollywood vampires in Forks, out on the peninsula. Some morbid element of the region has arrested our imaginations. It could be the skies: So gray and responsible for all the rain that keeps everything perennially damp. Or perhaps it’s the abundance of old-growth timber — plenty of dense and protected woods for stashing bodies. Rivers, branching across the state are another nature-made means of evidence disposal. It is rumored that Ridgway discarded the bodies of as many as 70 women around the Green River, 65 miles long descending from the Cascades and entering the Puget Sound just west of Seattle. In Washington State, geography and meteorology conspire to creep us out. But perhaps most lurid is the ocean itself, not just because it continues to spew body parts to its surface but also because of its infinite and perplexing nature. Its unknowability, though alluring to those in the script-writing business, has puzzled scientists and casual observers of the Sound for generations.

The southern portion of the Salish Sea is more familiarly known as Puget Sound, a body of water servicing the Seattle metropolitan area, home to about 3.8 million residents and plenty of industry — Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, among others — all luxuriously settled in one of America’s most beautiful and diverse oceanic ecosystems. Seattle is rainy and weird, a place for artists and musicians to brood beneath weather-pregnant clouds, an offbeat city for both the creative and outdoorsy, resting in a hammock between two mountain ranges. But recently the area has seen changes out of its control: The tech industry is expected to expand the population of the Salish Sea region to 9 million people in the coming decades and has wiped away many of the city’s distinctive traits. The former home of Kurt Cobain and birthplace of grunge now has a median home value of more than $700,000 and mostly functions to accommodate well-compensated tech workers. It’s still weird though — after all, feet keep floating ashore.

A pattern of body parts washing ashore has all the trappings of a serial killer scenario or a horror movie or, in the very least, of an otherworldly phenomenon.

Last fall, I went looking for a foot. More specifically, I went to Crane’s Landing on Whidbey Island — a refuge in Puget Sound just north of Seattle — where a foot had been found, looking to see if the beach would tell me anything about why the sea had dropped the foot there. Off the ferry, I drove a narrow roadway so starved of sunshine that moss grew along its centerline. It wound through a collection of homes that petered out down by the water in a dead end. The pebble beach comprised of mostly smooth skipping stones, was lined with a row of ragged pilings, head-high with rotted bases, the remnants of the landing that had been the beach’s namesake.

When you’re from Seattle, it’s almost routine to be dazzled by the macabre sagas of the sea. As a child, my favorite story was one my uncle told about a body floating up behind his live-aboard sailboat on Lake Union. The idea of that bloated body floated into my imagination and from there on out, when visiting my family on their sailboat, I would keep my eyes glued to the water in the event another poor soul should bob up to the surface for my discovery. Read more…

The American Worth Ethic

Getty / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Bryce Covert | Longreads | April 2019 | 13 minutes (3,374 words)

“The American work ethic, the motivation that drives Americans to work longer hours each week and more weeks each year than any of our economic peers, is a long-standing contributor to America’s success.” Thus reads the first sentence of a massive report the Trump administration released in July 2018. Americans’ drive to work ever harder, longer, and faster is at the heart of the American Dream: the idea, which has become more mythology than reality in a country with yawning income inequality and stagnating upward economic mobility, that if an American works hard enough she can attain her every desire. And we really try: We put in between 30 to 90 minutes more each day than the typical European. We work 400 hours more annually than the high-output Germans and clock more office time than even the work-obsessed Japanese.

The story of individual hard work is embedded into the very founding of our country, from the supposedly self-made, entrepreneurial Founding Fathers to the pioneers who plotted the United States’ western expansion; little do we acknowledge that the riches of this country were built on the backs of African slaves, many owned by the Founding Fathers themselves, whose descendants live under oppressive policies that continue to leave them with lower incomes and overall wealth and in greater poverty. We — the “we” who write the history books — would rather tell ourselves that the people who shaped our country did it through their own hard work and not by standing on the shoulders, or stepping on the necks, of others. It’s an easier story to live with. It’s one where the people with power and money have it because they deserve it, not because they took it, and where we each have an equal shot at doing the same.

Because for all our national pride in our puritanical work ethic, the ethic doesn’t apply evenly. At the highest income levels, wealthy Americans are making money passively, through investments and inheritances, and doing little of what most would consider “work.” Basic subsistence may soon be predicated on whether and how much a poor person works, while the rich count on tax credits and carve-outs designed to protect stockpiles of wealth created by money begetting itself. It’s the poor who are expected to work the hardest to prove that they are worthy of Americanness, or a helping hand, or humanity. At the same time, we idolize and imitate the rich. If you’re rich, you must have worked hard. You must be someone to emulate. Maybe you should even be president.

* * *

Trump has a long history of antipathy to the poor, a word which he uses as a synonym for “welfare,” which he understands only as a pejorative. When he and his father were sued by the Department of Justice in 1973 for discriminating against black tenants in their real estate business, he shot back that he was being forced to rent to “welfare recipients.” Nearly 40 years later, he called President Obama “our Welfare & Food Stamp President,” saying he “doesn’t believe in work.” He wrote in his 2011 book Time To Get Tough, “There’s nothing ‘compassionate’ about allowing welfare dependency to be passed from generation to generation.”

Perhaps. But Trump certainly knows about relying on things passed from generation to generation. His self-styled origin story is that he got his start with a “small” $1 million loan from his real estate tycoon father, Fred C. Trump, which he used to grow his own empire. “I built what I built myself,” he has claimed. “I did it by working long hours, and working hard and working smart.”

It’s an interesting interpretation of “myself”: A New York Times investigation in October reported that, instead, Trump has received at least $413 million from his father’s businesses over the course of his life. “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. By the time he was 17, his father had given him part ownership of a 52-unit apartment building,” reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner wrote. “Soon after Mr. Trump graduated from college, he was receiving the equivalent of $1 million a year from his father. The money increased with the years, to more than $5 million annually in his 40s and 50s.” The Times found 295 different streams of revenue Fred created to enrich his son — loans that weren’t repaid, three trust funds, shares in partnerships, lump-sum gifts — much of it further inflated by reducing how much went to the government. Donald and his siblings helped their parents dodge taxes with sham corporations, improper deductions, and undervalued assets, helping evade levies on gifts and inheritances.

If you’re rich, you must have worked hard. You must be someone to emulate. Maybe you should even be president.

Even the money that was made squarely owed a debt to the government. Fred Trump nimbly rode the rising wave of federal spending on housing that began with the New Deal and continued with the G.I. Bill. “Fred Trump would become a millionaire many times over by making himself one of the nation’s largest recipients of cheap government-backed building loans,” the Times reported. Donald carried on this tradition of milking government subsidies to accumulate fortunes. He obtained at least $885 million in perfectly legal grants, subsidies, and tax breaks from New York to build his real estate business.

Someone could have taken this largesse and worked hard to grow it into something more, but Donald Trump was not that someone. Much of his fortune comes not from the down and dirty work of running businesses, but from slapping his name on everything from golf courses to steaks. Many of these deals entail merely licensing his name while a developer actually runs things. And as president, he still doesn’t seem inclined to clock much time doing actual work.

That hasn’t stopped him from putting work at the center of his administration’s poverty-related policies. In the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ lengthy tome, it argued for adding work requirements to a new universe of public benefits. These requirements, which up until the Trump administration only existed for direct cash assistance and food stamps, require a recipient not just to put in a certain number of hours at a job or some other qualifying activity, but to amass paperwork to prove those hours each month. The CEA report is focused, supposedly, on “the importance and dignity of work.” But the benefits of engaging in labor are only deemed important for a particular population: “welfare recipients who society expects to work.” Over and over, it takes for granted that our country only expects the poorest to work in order to prove themselves worthy of government funds, specifically targeting those who get food stamps to feed their families, housing assistance to keep roofs over their heads, and Medicaid to stay healthy.

* * *

The report doesn’t just represent an ethos in the administration; it was also a justification for concrete actions it had already taken and more it would soon roll out. Last April, Trump signed an executive order that ordered federal agencies to review public assistance programs in order to see if they could impose work requirements unilaterally to “ensure that they are consistent with principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources,” as the document states, while also “reserving public assistance programs for those who are truly in need.”

The administration has also pushed forward on its own. In 2017, it announced that states could apply for waivers that would allow them to implement work requirements in Medicaid for the first time, and so far more than a dozen states have taken it up on the offer, with Arkansas’s rule in effect since June 2018. (It has now been halted by a federal judge.) In that state, Medicaid recipients had to spend 80 hours a month at work, school, or volunteering, and report those activities to the government in order to keep getting health insurance. And in April 2018, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson unveiled a proposal to let housing authorities implement work requirements for public housing residents and rental assistance recipients. Trump pushed Congress to include more stringent work requirements in the food stamp program as it debated the most recent farm bill, arguing it would “get America back to work.” When that effort failed, the Agriculture Department turned around and proposed a rule to impose the requirements by itself.

These aren’t fiscal necessities — they’re crackdowns on the poor, justified by the idea that they should prove themselves worthy of the benefits that help them survive, that are not just cruel but out of step with real life. Most people who turn to public programs already work, and those who don’t often have good reason. More than 60 percent of people on Medicaid are working. They remain on Medicaid because their pay isn’t enough to keep them out of poverty, and many of the low-wage jobs they work don’t offer health insurance they can afford. Of those not working, most either have a physical impairment or conflicting responsibilities like school or caregiving.

Enrollment in food stamps tells the same story. Among the “work-capable” adults on food stamps, about two thirds work at some point during the year, while 84 percent live in a household where someone works. But low-wage work is often chaotic and unpredictable. Recipients are more likely to turn to food stamps during a spell of unemployment or too few hours, then stop when they resume steadier employment. Many of those who are supposedly capable of work but don’t have a job have a health barrier or live with someone who has one; they’re in school, they’re caring for family, or they just can’t find work in their community.

Work requirements, then, fail to account for the reality of poor people’s lives. It’s not that there’s a widespread lack of work ethic among people who earn the least, but that there’s a lack of steady pay and consistent opportunities that allow someone to sustain herself and her family without assistance. We also know work requirements just don’t work. They’ve existed in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash-assistance program for decades, yet they don’t help people find meaningful, lasting work; instead they serve as a way to shove them out of programs they desperately need. The result is more poverty, not more jobs.

If this country were so concerned about helping people who might face barriers to working get jobs, we might not be the second-lowest among OECD member countries by percentage of GDP spent on labor-market programs like job-search assistance or retraining. The poor in particular face barriers like affordable childcare and reliable transportation, and could use education or training to reach for better-paid, more meaningful work. But we do little to extend these supports. Instead, we chastise them for not pulling on their frayed bootstraps hard enough.

We also seem content with the notion that a person who doesn’t work — either out of inability or refusal — doesn’t deserve the building blocks of staying alive. The programs Trump is targeting, after all, are about basic needs: housing to stay safe from the elements, food to keep from going hungry, healthcare to receive treatment and avoid dying of neglect. Even if it were true that there was a horde of poor people refusing to work, do we want to condemn them to starvation and likely death? In one of the world’s richest countries, do we really balk at spending money on keeping our people — even lazy ones — alive?

We also know work requirements just don’t work. They’ve existed in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash-assistance program for decades, yet they don’t help people find meaningful, lasting work; instead they serve as a way to shove them out of programs they desperately need. The result is more poverty, not more jobs.

Plenty of other countries don’t do so. Single mothers experience higher rates of destitution than coupled parents or people without children all over the world. But the higher poverty rate in the U.S. as compared to other developed countries isn’t because we have more single mothers; instead, it’s because we do so little to help them. Compare us to Denmark, which gives parents unconditional cash benefits for each of their children regardless of whether or how much they work, on top of generously subsidizing childcare, offering universal health coverage, and guaranteeing paid leave. It’s no coincidence that they also have a lower poverty rate, both generally and for single mothers specifically. A recent examination of poverty across countries found that children are at higher risk in the U.S because we have a sparse social safety net that’s so closely tied to demanding that people work. It makes us an international outlier, the world’s miser that only opens a clenched fist to the poor if they’re willing to demonstrate their worthiness first.

Here, too, America’s history of slavery and ongoing racism rears its head. According to a trio of renowned economists, we don’t have a European-style social safety net because “racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” White people turn against funding public benefit programs when they feel their racial status threatened, particularly benefits they (falsely) believe mainly accrue to black people. The black poor are seen as the most undeserving of help and most in need of proving their worthiness to get it. States with larger percentages of black residents, for example, focus less on TANF’s goal of providing cash to the needy and have stingier benefits with higher hurdles to enrollment.

* * *

The CEA’s report on work requirements claimed that being an adult who doesn’t work is particularly prevalent among “those living in low-income households.” But that’s debatable. The more income someone has, the less likely he is to be getting it from wages. In 2012, those earning less than $25,000 a year made nearly three quarters of that money from a job. Those making more than $10 million, on the other hand, made about half of their money from capital gains — in other words, returns on investments. The bottom half of the country has, on average, just $826 in income from capital investments each; the average for those in the top 1 percent is more than $16 million.

The richest are the least likely to have their money come from hard labor — yet there’s no moral panic over whether they’re coddled or lacking in self reliance. Instead, government benefits help the rich protect and grow idle wealth. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at a lower rate than regular salaried income. Inheritances were taxed at an average rate of 4 percent in 2009, compared to the average rate of 18 percent for money earned by working and saving. When investments are bequeathed, the recipient owes no taxes on any asset appreciation.


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In fact, government tax benefits that increase people’s take-home money at the expense of what the government collects for its own coffers overwhelmingly benefit the rich over the poor (or even the middle class). More than 60 percent of the roughly $900 billion in annual tax expenditures goes to the richest 20 percent of American families. That figure dwarfs what the government expends on many public benefit programs. The government spends more than three times as much on tax subsidies for homeowners, mostly captured by the well-to-do, than it does on rental assistance for the poor. The three benefit programs the Trump administration is concerned with — Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance — come to about $705 billion in combined spending.

While the administration has been concerned with what it can do to compel the poor to work, it’s handed out more largesse to the idle rich. Its signature tax-cut package, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, offered an extra cut for so-called “pass-through” businesses, like law or real estate firms. But the fine print included a wrinkle: If someone is considered actively involved in his pass-through business, only 30 percent of his earnings could qualify for the new discount. If someone is passively involved, however — a shareholder who doesn’t do much about the day-to-day work of the company — then he gets 100 percent of the new benefit.

Then there’s the law’s significant lowering of the estate tax. The tax is levied on only the biggest, most valuable inheritances passed down from wealthy parent to newly wealthy child. Before the Republicans’ tax bill, only the richest 0.2 percent of estates had to pay the tax when fortunes changed hands. Now it’s just the richest 0.1 percent, or a mere 1,800 very wealthy families worth more than $22 million. The rest get to pass money to their heirs tax-free. Those who do pay it will be paying less when tax time comes due — $4.4 million less, to be exact.

Despite the Republican rhetoric that lowering the estate tax is about saving family farms, it’s really about allowing an aristocracy to calcify — one in which rich parents ensure their children are rich before they lift a single finger in work. As those heirs receive their fortunes, they also receive the blessing that comes with riches: the halo of success and, therefore, deservedness without having to work to prove it. Yet there’s evidence that increasing taxes on inheritances has the potentially salutary effect of getting heirs to work more. The more their inheritances are taxed, the more they end up paying in labor taxes — evidence that they’re working harder for their livings, not just coasting on generational wealth. Perhaps our tax code could encourage rich heirs to experience the dignity of work.

* * *

Trump’s CEA report is accurate about at least one thing: Our country has a history of only offering public benefits to the poor either deemed worthy through their work or exempt through old age or disability. An outlier was the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families after Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in the ’90s. But the 1996 transformation of the program took what was a promise of cash for poor mothers and changed it into an obstacle course of proving a mother’s worth before she can get anywhere close to a check. It paved the way for the current administration’s obsession with work requirements.

Largesse for the rich, on the other hand, has rarely included such tests. No one has been made to pee in a cup for tax breaks on their mortgages, which cost as much as the food stamp program but overwhelmingly benefit families that earn more than $100,000. No one has had to prove a certain number of work hours to get a lower tax rate on investment income or an inheritance. They get that discount on their money without having to do any work at all.

We haven’t always been so extreme in our dichotomous treatment of the rich and poor; throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, we coupled high marginal taxes on the wealthy with a minimum wage that ensured that people who put in full-time work could rise out of poverty. The estate tax has been as high as 77 percent. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recently told an audience of the ultrawealthy at Davos, we’re living proof that high taxes can spread shared prosperity. “The United States, that’s where it has actually worked, in the 1950s, during Republican President Eisenhower,” he pointed out. “This is not rocket science.” It was during the same era that we also created significant anti-poverty programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, this country pioneered the idea of progressive taxation and has always had some form of tax on inheritance to avoid creating an aristocracy. But we’ve papered over that history as tax rates have cratered and poverty has climbed.

Instead, as Reaganomics and neoliberal ideas took hold of our politics, we turned back to the Horatio Alger myth that success is attained on an individual basis by hard work alone, and that riches are the proof of a dogged drive. Lower tax rates naturally follow under the theory that the rich should keep more of their deserved bounty. And if you’re poor, coming to the government seeking a helping hand up, you failed.

The country is due for a reckoning with our obsession with work. There are certainly financial and emotional benefits that come from having a job. But why are we only concerned with whether the poor reap those benefits? Is working ourselves to the bone the best signifier of our worth — and are there basic elements of life that we should guarantee regardless of work? It doesn’t mean dropping all emphasis on work ethic. But it does require a deeper examination of who we expect to work — and why.

* * *

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy and a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross   

A Rich Awakening

iStock / Getty Images Plus

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,392 words)

We all the know the stats, that by 2030 the richest 1 percent could be hoarding two-thirds of the world’s wealth. Tax the rich! Redistribute to the poor! It’s the kind of thing you hear lately set to some lame music in a weirdly cut NowThis News video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rutger Bregman. (It’s always some scrappy progressive, not some bloated billionaire because, I don’t know, *yawns, eats some cake.*) Perhaps the rich will be moved by the fact that income equality is not only bad for the collective mental health, but their own? No? That the 10 percent’s multiplying accessories — private jets and yachts and enormous holiday homes — hogs nearly half the world’s emissions, killing the earth we all share? No? Nothing? What’s that you say, infrastructure investment started plummeting just as inequality began rising? But all the philanthropy! Which, sure, America’s largest donors may give a little more than before, but they also make way more than they used to. And as Jacobin magazine recently noted, “those nations — mostly in Scandinavia — that have the highest levels of equality and social well-being have the tiniest philanthropic sectors.” When you have equality, you don’t need long Greek words.

To recognize this, as a rich person, you need to have a sort of reverse double consciousness. “Double consciousness” originates with W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, who coined it in 1897 as one way to describe the experience of  being an African American in a white supremacist world. In The Atlantic Monthly he defined it as, “…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others….” The concept is based on being oppressed. What I’m talking about is an inverted version based on being the oppressor. It is the recognition that not only do you have outsized means, but that they come at the expense of others. It requires not only self awareness, but other awareness, and it’s a prerequisite for change.

Roy Disney’s granddaughter, Abigail, for instance, has given $70 million away over the past four decades, which is more than she ever inherited. “The problem is that there’s a systematic favoring of people who have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth,” she tweeted after a viral appearance on CNBC last month in which she said CEOs were overpaid. “The U.S. must make structural changes by taxing the wealthy.” To say that, she had to have had some kind of awakening — but what was it? In her case it was a sudden burst of extraordinary wealth and its human toll — not on others, but on the wealthy themselves. In 1984, when the heiress was in college, Michael Eisner became the chairman and CEO of Disney and launched its stocks into the stratosphere. Abigail’s father embraced the excess income — the too-big private jet, the too-much drinking — and no one questioned him, not even about his alcoholism. “That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people,” she recently told The Cut. “I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.” Read more…

‘I’m Always Writing Against This Idea That Denver’s a White Space.’

Adam Morgan | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,462 words)

 

There’s a section in Robert Bolaño’s 2666 — “The Part About the Crimes” — where women are raped and murdered for nearly 300 pages, their mutilated bodies abandoned in the deserts of northern Mexico. The violence is brutal enough to seem gratuitous, even sadistic, but Bolaño was merely fictionalizing the real-life female homicides of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. And while 2666 circles these murders like a vulture, the women themselves barely get a chance to speak.

The women in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s debut collection of short stories, Sabrina & Corina — Chicana and Indigenous women living in Denver and southern Colorado — suffer similar fates. But we meet their sisters, mothers, and daughters. We meet the men who abuse them. And finally, we hear their voices.

In the title story, a teenaged cosmetology student is tasked with applying her murdered cousin’s funeral makeup. In “Sisters”, a double date leaves one sibling blind. In “Cheesman Park”, a bank teller flees Los Angeles for Denver after she and her mother are attacked, separately, by the men who claim to love them. And in “Any Further West,” a sex worker and her daughter travel in the opposite direction in search of a better life.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving, textured, masterful collection, saturated with a strong sense of place. I spoke with Kali Fajardo-Anstine about her book, the cycles of violence, and the gentrification of her hometown’s Chicano and Indigenous communities. Read more…

When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip

Library of Congress / Corbis Historical / Getty, Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Yuval Taylor | An excerpt from Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal | W. W. Norton & Company | March 2019 | 30 minutes (8,692 words)

 

Ornate and imposing, the century-old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal in downtown Mobile, Alabama, resembles a cross between a Venetian palace and a Spanish mission. Here, on St. Joseph Street, on July 23, 1927, one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history occurred, a chance incident that would seal the friendship of two of its most influential writers. “No sooner had I got off the train” from New Orleans, Langston wrote in The Big Sea, “than I ran into Zora Neale Hurston, walking intently down the main street. I didn’t know she was in the South [actually, he did, having received a letter from her in March, but he had no idea she was in Alabama], and she didn’t know I was either, so we were very glad to see each other.”

Zora was in town to interview Cudjo Lewis, purportedly the only person still living who had been born in Africa and enslaved in the United States. She then planned to drive back to New York, doing folklore research along the way. In late 1926, Franz Boas had recommended her to Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, together with Elsie Clews Parsons of the American Folklore Society, had decided to bankroll her to the tune of $1,400. With these funds, Zora had been gathering folklore in Florida all spring and summer. As the first Southern black to do this, her project was, even at this early stage, clearly of immense importance. It had, however, been frustrating. “I knew where the material was, all right,” she would later write. “But I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?’ The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn’t I try over there?”

Langston, meanwhile, had been touring the South for months, penniless as usual, making some public appearances and doing his own research. He read his poems at commencement for Nashville’s Fisk University in June; he visited refugees from the Mississippi flood in Baton Rouge; he strolled the streets alone in New Orleans, ducking into voodoo shops; he took a United Fruit boat to Havana and back; and his next stop was to be the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was his very first visit to the South.

When Zora invited him to join her expedition in her little old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” Langston happily accepted. (The car looked a lot like a Model T Ford, and could only seat two.) Langston adored the company of entertainers, and Zora was as entertaining as they came. Langston did not know how to drive, but Zora loved driving and didn’t mind a whit. They decided to make a real trip of it, “stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur [sic], and big old lies,” as Langston wrote. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. I knew it would be fun traveling with her. It was.” Read more…

But You Look Fine: A Reading List About Disabilities, Accommodations, and School

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During my freshman year of college, a series of unexpected neurological episodes ruptured my conception of how I moved through the world. I fainted one evening after track practice and began experiencing episodes of dizziness, blurred vision, and what the doctors would label as “aphasia” and “transient alteration of awareness,” medical terms that tried to characterize the way I would say the same word over and over unintentionally (“I, I, I, I, uh, I, I, I”) and lose memory of what had happened while I was incoherent.

I was a Division I athlete at the time, a runner. My identity in athletics and in school centered around perfectionism; I enjoyed running to hit a precise list of splits and I brought the same ceaseless work ethic to the classroom. I measured success in straight-A’s and faster times. But once my episodes began, my illusion of control eroded. I was no longer able to run without falling, and my schoolwork, which had been a joy all my life, was interrupted by my own body with periods of disorientation that lasted for hours. Though I saw a neurologist frequently, he was unable to give me a diagnosis.
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If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium

Rick Steves: beloved travel guru, and total pothead. (In this Monday, Nov. 26, 2012 photo, Rick Steves holds a plastic marijuana leaf necklace as he sits with a poster used to advertise his business in Edmonds, Wash. AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

Rick Steves wants to help you travel the world, no matter your budget. Not just because travel is fun, but because travel expands your horizons and changes your worldview. Steves is about a lot more than making sure you maximize your 3-day museum pass — did you know that the first time he traveled to Central America, “he came back so outraged that he wrote a fiery tract called ‘There’s Blood on Your Banana,’ then flew to Washington and hand-delivered a copy to the office of every member of Congress”? Sam Anderson‘s New York Times profile of Steves is a loving, rollicking, educational tribute to the man who launched a thousand backpackers.

Sometimes, fans urge Steves to run for office. When I asked him if he would ever get into politics, he had an answer ready: “I already am.” Good travel teaching, in his eyes, is inherently political. To stay in a family-owned hotel in Bulgaria is to strengthen global democracy; to pack light is to break the iron logic of consumerism; to ride a train across Europe is to challenge the fossil-fuel industry. Travel, to Steves, is not some frivolous luxury — it is an engine for improving humankind, for connecting people and removing their prejudices, for knocking distant cultures together to make unlikely sparks of joy and insight. Given that millions of people have encountered the work of Steves over the last 40 years, on TV or online or in his guidebooks, and that they have carried those lessons to untold other millions of people, it is fair to say that his life’s work has had a real effect on the collective life of our planet. When people tell Steves to stay out of politics, to stick to travel, he can only laugh.

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I’m Writing You from Tehran

House party in an affluent section of northern Tehran. Photo by David Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Delphine Minoui | I’m Writing You from Tehran | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | April 2019 | 32 minutes (6,421 words)

 

It all started with flowers. Flowers, everywhere flowers. And all those shouts of joy escaping from chadors. I remember that May 23, 1998, as if it were yesterday. The second of Khordad, according to the Iranian calendar. A year had gone by since Khatami was elected. The scent of spring permeated the Iranian capital. On Enghelab (Revolution) Street, Iranians were celebrating the first anniversary of his victory. I had landed in Tehran a few days earlier. I was staying with Grandmother, my last family connection to Iran since your passing. Despite her inordinate protectiveness, I had managed to extricate myself from her house. It was my first outing. To help pay for my journey, I had pitched a documentary project on Iranian youth to Radio France. In the West, Iran had become respectable again, and in Parisian newsrooms, questions were pouring in from all sides. Did Khatami’s victory signal the end of repressive theocracy? Was democracy compatible with Islam? What did “Generation K” — all those young people my age born under Khomeini; raised under his successor, Khamenei; and the main electors of the new president — dream of? The stipend for my freelancing only just about covered my plane ticket. But the idea of working for one of the biggest French media companies and being in the land of my ancestors was more than enough compensation for me.

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Honey Bees, Worker Bees, and the Economic Violence of Land Grabs

Don Farrall / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (3,024 words)

 

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

“One bad thing about me is that I don’t give a shit about the environment.” That’s what I told my smart, edgy friend when we were walking to get coffee one day. I admitted that I suck at recycling, and that what I care about is workers, “not like, being vegan and shit.”

“Yea fuck those bumper stickers with the panda on them,” she replied.

The truth is I didn’t think those worries were for me, the type of planning and research it takes to be green. That was a concern for people living a different quality of life, people who carried around large glass bottles filled with distilled water, ladies in lululemon pants who consistently applied Burt’s bees lip balm, ate cacao energy balls, and drove hybrid vehicles. No, caring about the planet was off limits for me.
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