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Grow Up

Spencer Platt / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | September 2019 |  8 minutes (2,168 words)

There’s a scene not quite midway through Mermaids, the ’60s-set coming-of-age drama starring Cher and Winona Ryder in which the mom acts like a kid and the kid acts like a mom, where Ryder is walking through her small town just after JFK has been assassinated. She passes adult after adult, each of them staring at the ground, shell-shocked, mourning. Then she comes across a bunch of children playing in some dead leaves and her voiceover breaks the silence: “It feels like there isn’t a single adult left on the entire planet.”

No kidding. I’m an adult but that is exactly how I feel right now, and it must be worse for kids: For Mari Copeny, now 11, as she sits cross-legged, alone, holding up a sign: flint mi has been without clean water since april 24th, 2014. For Autumn Peltier, now 14, the First Nations Canadian who confronted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 about his continued support of oil pipelines: “People my age are starting to notice how adults are treating the planet.” For the tens of thousands of students in Hong Kong who attended demonstrations instead of their first day of school in order to stand up for democracy amid violent protests. With no future, there’s no need to go to class, one sign read. For the sea of kids who took part in the March For Our Lives to call for U.S. gun legislation in the wake of a cascading number of school shootings. For all the children who continue to strike alongside Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist initially inspired not by the adults finally taking action, but by the kids calling out their inaction.

Most of these people can’t vote, remember. Imagine how that must feel. Imagine knowing what to do but not being able to do it. Imagine how frustrating that must be, how powerless. Now imagine being the person who can do it. And imagine laughing instead. Asked for her message to world leaders at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week, Thunberg said, “My message is that we’ll be watching you.” Delighted, the audience laughed and clapped. How adorable! But Thunberg remained stone-faced. Then her eyes reddened, then she started to cry. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she seethed. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you!” Her anger came from knowing that, despite sounding scientists’ climate alarm for the millionth time, there would be no solution, because, “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.” And this is where it’s at right now as we face the end: The children, who have no power, are the only ones who know what to do with it. Read more…

Climate Messaging: A Case for Negativity

A home on stilts sits amidst coastal waters and marshlands along Louisiana Highway 1 on August 24, 2019 in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land and wetlands, an area roughly the size of Delaware. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,656 words)

An ex-boyfriend once told me that if someone were to make a movie about his life it would begin with a pregnant woman riding a Coke machine out of a hurricane. That woman was his grandmother, pregnant with his dad during Hurricane Audrey, which killed at least 416 people, spawned 23 tornadoes inland, and effectively destroyed Cameron Parish — currently the largest parish in Louisiana and one of the least populated. Cameron was hit again in 2005 by Hurricane Rita, which wiped out my ex-boyfriend’s house, and then again in 2008 by Hurricane Ike. It was in the news more recently when it was revealed the area has the highest percentage of climate change skeptics in the country.

I was indignant, not about the polling but about the way it was presented. The economy down there is heavily reliant on shrimping and oil. Young people generally move forty miles north up to the city of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish and the land in Cameron is forecast to be some of the first in the United States to disappear into the sea — a much-cited football field of the state is lost to the Gulf of Mexico every hour and the land is turning to lace. It’s not that people in Cameron are just supernaturally stupid, I said to this ex-boyfriend over the phone, the problem is that most everyone who had the means and believes in climate change has already left. He’s a coastal engineer working on a project to restore the state’s wetlands, so it’s not like he’s indifferent to this, but he told me not to get worked up.

“We are stupid,” he said. Read more…

What Should Universal Basic Income Look Like?

Anthony Bradshaw / Getty

Livia Gershon | Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,264 words)

Andrew Yang, presidential candidate, serial entrepreneur, and icon of Silicon Valley futurism, has a vision. As you know if you’ve ever heard his name, Yang supports a universal basic income, $1,000 a month paid by the government to every American citizen, from part-time baristas to millionaire bond traders. To Yang, the UBI, as it’s called, is the answer to nearly every question about the economy. For out-of-work machinists, it’s a cushion that would make it possible to reorient to a new job. For would-be entrepreneurs, it’s the cost of ramen and a bed while they hustle to get off the ground. For stay-at-home parents, it’s recognition and support for crucial unpaid labor. For down-on-their-luck towns, it’s an economic stimulus plan.

“This is the trickle up economy from our people, families, and communities—up,” Yang told Face the Nation in August. “It will create over two million new jobs in our communities because the money will go right into local mainstream businesses, to car repairs, daycare expenses, Little League sign-ups.” Read more…

How Thailand’s Rich Escape Prosecution

AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn

As many Thai residents say, “Thai jails are only for the poor.” Exhibit A: the 27-year-old socialite named Vorayuth “Boss” Yoovidhya, part of the billionaire family who owns the Red Bull beverage empire. In 2012, he mortally wounded police officer Wichean Glanprasert while driving, then he fled the scene. Boss remains free. Glanprasert’s family mourn while wrestling with this accepted double standard. For The Walrus, Martha Mendoza follows the Red Bull family’s trail of shell companies, and Boss’ social media posts, to find how they not only protect their assets, but how Boss and other Thai elites evade prosecution while protestors and journalists routinely end up in prison for minor offenses.

Within weeks of the incident, Boss was back to enjoying his family’s jet-set lifestyle: he flew around the world on private Red Bull jets, cheered the company’s Formula One racing team from Red Bull’s VIP seats, and kept a shiny black Porsche Carrera in London with custom licence plates—B055 RBR, or Boss Red Bull racing.

An Interpol arrest notice was issued five years after the accident, but so far, it has effectively been useless. Boss is reported to have at least two passports and a complex network of offshore accounts, and with these tools, he’s able to travel the world with impunity. More than 120 photos posted on Facebook and Instagram, as well as some racing blogs, show Boss visiting at least nine countries since Glanprasert’s death. Stops include the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Osaka, Japan, where he posed, grinning and wearing robes from Hogwarts’s darkest dorm, Slytherin house. He’s cruised Monaco’s harbour, snowboarded Japan’s fresh powder, and celebrated his birthday at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London. This means that while authorities say they’ve had no idea where Boss was, his friends, family, and all of their followers seem to have had no doubt about his whereabouts and the good times he’s been having. One summer, in Japan, he posted a ten-second video of sausage and eggs decorated with seaweed eyes, tagging a young relative. His parents responded with a thumbs up.

In Thailand, many say that the justice system has two tracks: one for the elite and one for everybody else. This is seen not just through brazen killings, like that of Glanprasert, but also through financial schemes used by the country’s wealthy. During the time Boss hid in plain sight, an Associated Press (AP) investigation into his whereabouts simultaneously exposed how the Yoovidhya family has spent decades hiding its assets in offshore accounts. As Brooke Harrington, professor of sociology at Dartmouth, said in a 2018 interview with NPR: “The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable….National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.”

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It Comes in Waves

Illustration by Matt Huhnh

Lilly Dancyger | Longreads | September 2019 | 11 minutes (2,790 words)

I never met Swedish journalist Kim Wall, but a few months after her mutilated torso was found in 2017, I dreamt that I’d been the last person to see her alive. The torso, riddled with stab wounds, washed up 11 days after she’d boarded a submarine belonging to Danish inventor Peter Madsen, to interview him for a story. In part of the dream, I saw myself on security footage, running, frantic, trying to find someone to tell what I knew about where she was in those 11 days she was missing, before she was officially one more murdered woman in the news. I woke up like coming up from an ice bath, gasping, eyes watering, still feeling a crushing guilt for letting her get on the submarine in the first place; for not somehow knowing what was going to happen, and stopping it.

When my cousin Sabina was murdered in 2010, I called the detectives handling the case to tell them about the dramatic break-up she’d recently been through, to say I didn’t know anything for sure but they might want to talk to her ex. She was popular in the club scene in Philadelphia, a budding model whose gigantic smile and fluttering eyelashes surely inspired some jealousy. I didn’t know all of the social dynamics of her world, but I told the detectives everything I could think of that she’d told me. I ran through possible scenarios of advances rebuffed, territories infringed upon, of elaborate grudges and plots. I terrified myself with thoughts of what petty trifle someone had decided was worth such a glowing 20-year-old’s life. People have murdered for the most insignificant things, and I wondered if I’d spend the rest of my life saying “over a guy” or “over a modeling job.”

I couldn’t face the idea that I would never see her again, so instead I focused on what I could do to help catch whoever did this; and what I maybe could have done, should have done, to prevent it from happening in the first place.

I was in another state when she was killed, but I wanted so badly to go back and walk Sabina home that night. The guilt of the inability to time-travel. Six months before she died, she posted a photo on Facebook from when she was about 2 and I was about 3, of me hugging her protectively while she leaned into me. She captioned it “you may have had a big sis, to protect you, but I had my big cus, and that was all I needed!” I pull it up periodically to torture myself.
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Fugitive Justice

Illustration by Lily Padula

Jennifer Lunden | Longreads | September 2019 | 25 minutes (6,331 words)

Our fuchsia had vanished. The empty pot lay broken on the front porch where just the previous day the fully flowered plant had hung, splendid and cheery. I found one lone tendril in the driveway — its three pink and purple blossoms still miraculously attached, its roots still flecked with soil. I tried to piece together the mystery, but I could not.

Later, I got an email from our tenant, Annie:

Someone absconded with one of the hanging fuchsia! Because I am a person with a strong sense of justice, I tracked a trail of blossoms and stems up to Cumberland Ave this morning, where I found the pot smashed and the tendrils scattered.

She had reclaimed our busted pot and left it on the porch. Annie chalked it up to a drunken lark, a random act of vandalism. But somebody had climbed our front steps, unhooked our hanging fuchsia, and left a trail of uprooted stems all the way around the block. Who would do such a thing? I wondered. Why?
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How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

A close-up of a human eye on an IBM computer monitor, 1983. (Photo by Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images)

Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

 

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom? Read more…

When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

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Can Tech Become Ethical, If It Learns to Be Mindful First?

Nano Calvo/VWPics via AP Images

No matter how recent advances many tech companies have made for humanity, they have also wreaked havoc on our world, from screen addiction to social fragmentation to a depressing sense of isolation. Conflicted tech workers are starting to face the fact that Big Tech hasn’t simply bettered the world, and some are seeking spirituality, psychedelics, meditation, and mindfulness to reconcile this with their traditional notions of success. For The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz examines what he calls “Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience.” Silicon Valley has earned our skepticism, and it’s tempting to dismiss this soul-seeking as PR or another passing trend, like open offices or those little fold-up commuter bikes. “But ultimately if a handful of people have this much power,” asks Esalen institute’s past C.E.O. Ben Tauber, “then, isn’t that worth a shot?” Maybe. So what’s this all look like?

Near the end of a placid April morning in San Francisco, a nonprofit called the Center for Humane Technology convened more than three hundred people in a midsized amphitheatre named SFJAZZ—co-founders of Pinterest and Craigslist and Apple, vice-presidents at Google and Facebook, several prominent venture capitalists, and many people whose job titles were “storyteller” or “human-experience engineer.” One attendee was Aden Van Noppen, who carried a notebook with a decal that read, “Move Purposefully and Fix Things.” She worked on tech policy in Barack Obama’s White House, then did a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School, and now runs Mobius, a Bay Area organization dedicated to “putting our well-being at the center of technology.” “The Valley right now is like a patient who’s just received a grave diagnosis,” she said. “There’s a type of person who reacts to that by staying in deflect-and-deny mode—‘How do we prevent anyone from knowing we’re sick?’ Then, there’s the type who wants to treat the symptoms, quickly and superficially, in the hope that the illness just goes away on its own. And there’s a third group, that wants to find a cure.” The audience at SFJAZZ comprised the third group—the concerned citizens of Silicon Valley.

Before the presentation, Van Noppen hosted a breakfast for a few members of the audience, including Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook employee and a co-inventor of the Like button, and Chris Messina, a former Google employee and the inventor of the hashtag. Messina wore a polo shirt, revealing a tattoo on each arm: a hashtag on the right, a Burning Man logo on the left. “It’s not nearly widespread enough yet,” he said, of the industry’s capacity for self-critique. “But even to get a group of people together like this and publicly acknowledge the depth of the problem? That would have been impossible a few years ago.”

“A few months ago,” Rosenstein said.

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Riding the Highs and Lows with My Mom

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Valentina Valentini | Longreads | August 2019 | 16 minutes (4,092 words)

I hadn’t wanted to go up there in the first place. Topanga Canyon only seems fun when you’re with hip Angelenos who say, “Let’s do something different this weekend,” like they invented being different. But my mom was in town — as she often is, despite living across the country in Massachusetts — and, in her words, needed to get out. She was staying at my sister’s in Marina Del Rey and was on a rigid schedule of driving the kids around to their multiple extracurricular activities, after which she might sit and draw dragons for an hour with my niece, or build rocket ships with my nephew, seemingly blissfully, and then text me complaining about how she never gets to do anything for herself when she visits, and begging me to accompany her on an outing. Or sometimes she’d hit a threshold and borrow my brother-in-law’s car to go out on her own, dancing until the wee hours of marine layer cloud-covered mornings in downtown Santa Monica.

She was 72 and I was 30, but I often felt as if I were her parent.

In Topanga, acoustic guitar and whining voices were surely in store. It would be the kind of friends my mother had when I was growing up, the ones who made their own hummus at spring equinox gatherings or encouraged her to bring her young kids to a sweat lodge to purge demons. The friends she should have had when she was in her early 20s, but instead was too busy (too young) raising her first three daughters with her alcoholic former high school beau in a suburb of Boston.

Every year on my birthday, my mom likes to recount my traumatic underwater birth: I came out of the womb into a Plexi glass bathtub, with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around my neck and knotted once; I had to be resuscitated, all while being filmed for an NBC evening special. Even moving cross-country didn’t stop her — she became prolific at texting and emoji-emoting on my special day. On my Facebook wall she’d splash phrases like, I remember moments before you crowned, when we were still one. (Heart emoji. Baby emoji. Kissy face with heart emoji.) Except that we were two. We were always two — me separate from her. But so often our roles would be reversed, and I wasn’t sure who was supposed to take care of whom.
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