Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a writer for Wired UK, Design Observer, and The Atlantic, among others, and an MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow, spending far, far too much time curating the web’s interestingness as @brainpicker.
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I’ve always found reading, writing, and thinking to be so tightly interwoven that, when done correctly, they become indistinguishable from one another. Like architecting your life and your social circle, architecting your mind’s life is an exercise in immersing yourself in an eclectic mix of viewpoints and directions of thought. In that way, longform is like the most intense of friendships, where the time dedication and the active choice to show up far eclipse the noncommittal acquaintanceship of soundbite culture. A healthy longform diet must thus include something that breaks your heart, something that gives you hope, something by someone you find a little self-righteous, something by someone with whom you’re a little bit in love—and, ideally, the inability to fully tell which is which. With this in mind, here are the five finest pieces I laid eyes and neurons on this year, which did for me all of the above, and then some.
A bittersweet story about Samuel Clemens, but really about something profoundly and universally human: love, timing, and the often tragic misalignment of the two. And in that story lies a subtle reminder that unless we pursue the heart’s desire with complete clarity of purpose and intention, we’re left forever playing out those could’ve-beens, as Twain did, in our dreams.
“Thus it was Sam’s stubbornness that foreclosed any further encounter with Laura Wright. Yet they did meet, time and again, over the years, in Clemens’ dreams. And dreams, Samuel Clemens came to believe, were as real as anything in the waking world.”
As both a marginalia obsessive and a hopeless bibliophile torn between the love of books and the mesmerism of the web, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of books—or, more accurately, about the function books have traditionally served as a medium for arguing and teasing out ideas of significance and cultural gravity. Hardly anyone fuses a bibliophile’s profound respect for books with a designer’s sensitivity to the reading experience and a digital entrepreneur’s visionary bravery more fluidly, articulately, and thoughtfully than Craig Mod.
“Manifested properly, each new person who participates in the production of digital marginalia changes the reading experience of that book for the next person. Analog marginalia doesn’t know other analog marginalia. Digital marginalia is a collective conversation, cumulative stratum.”
Gopnik is one of my favorite nonfiction authors working today. And this is no ordinary book review of what eventually became my favorite history book of 2011—it paints a riveting connect-the-dots portrait of information’s history and future through such fascinating and surprisingly related subjects as African drum languages, the Morse Code, Marshall McLuhan, and Google.
“Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.”
There is something magnificent and magical that happens when we open ourselves up to the poetry of possibility—of “overlookedness,” if you will. (Lesson #1.)
“The saltbox itself as an object is unremarkable. Alone, it communicates nothing. Says nothing about its role. Its intention. Its history as a gift born out of a romance between my maternal grandparents. Says nothing of its possibilities.
But add people, and it becomes a central iterative device. The license to change, to iterate, to test, to add, to make, to make over, to create (clearly, with food). It gives license and latitude to stray from what has been written (recipes) for those too shy to do. Therefore, it gives strength. It gives iterative powers to those not comfortable with version control. With its subtlety comes comfort in change.
One might say the saltbox, and access to it, is magic.”
Picking just one of Maria Bustillos’ many brilliant pieces was excruciating, but this meditation on the future of authorship, content curation, and intellectual innovation is simply exquisite, and tickles my own restlessness about the changing currencies and sandboxes of authorship in the age of information overload.
“All these elements—the abandonment of ‘point of view,’ the willingness to consider the present with the same urgency as the past, the borrowing ‘of wit or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending us either,’ the desire to understand the mechanisms by which we are made to understand—are cornerstones of intellectual innovation in the Internet age. In particular, the liberation from ‘authorship’ (brought about by the emergence of a ‘hive mind’) is starting to have immediate implications that few beside McLuhan foresaw. His work represents a synthesis of the main precepts of New Criticism with what we have come to call cultural criticism and/or media theory.”
Claire Howorth is the arts editor at The Daily (pictured with colleagues Rich Juzwiak, Zach Baron and David Walters).
***
Picking five favorite longreads of the year is tough—an Oscar-esque problem of autumnal riches and a fussy year-long memory—so there are actually nine (or ten or eleven*) here. Maybe I’m just a long-lister, which seems appropriate for a Longreader.
***
THE LION
I sent in my choices last Thursday afternoon, unaware of impending coincidence, and this article was at the top of the list, where it remains. No need to contextualize it.
Noreen Malone’s consideration of her millennial generation’s warped Weltanschauung partly blames the grownups. Lori Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic, published months earlier, serves as a perfect grownup riposte.
(But when did that spelling of “alright” become all right?)
THE PALATE PLEASER
Burkhard Bilger’s take on neo-old Southern cuisine, featuring wildman chef Sean Brock, is deeply satisfying food writing. Also: crazy, tiny, mohawked lowcountry boars!
Throughout October and early November, I was deeply concerned that a majority of my home state would do something shamefully stupid and pass Initiative 26. Irin Carmon’s thorough reporting is basic, fundamental journalism—informing the people!—at its very best.
My love for these pieces is still strong, after the season of their publication is gone. I’m cheaply lumping them under a gender rubric mainly because they’re by men, on men. And Don Henley was stuck in my head. Sean Fennessey on Michael Bay (explosions!), Bill Simmons on male movie stars (ephemera!), Jon Caramanica on Bon Iver (Emma! Eau Claire!), and Colson Whitehead on poker (everything else!). (*I’m prohibited by affiliation to mention one of this year’s most spectacular opuses, Zach Baron’s “Fear and Self-Loathing in Las Vegas.”)
Lisa Howorth—a.k.a. “Mom”—wrote a lovely, lyrical piece in the Oxford American’s music issue. She may squirm at this shameless shout-out, but that’s kind of how I felt reading the third graf.
Selected according to a complicated (read: entirely arbitrary) judgment of their degree of difficulty and technical execution, and listed in no particular order. Full disclosure: I’ve written for several of the publications cited on this list, but I’ve excluded from consideration any writer with whom I’m personally acquainted.
When it comes to degree of difficulty, delivering an interesting Mitt Romney profile is like nailing a reverse four-and-a-half somersault. But this story succeeded—not the least of which due to its brilliant packaging, which included a now-infamous cover photo of Romney with cash coming out of his suit pockets and the accompanying headline: “Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy.” Written without the (perhaps dubious) benefit of an interview with Romney, the story nonetheless managed to summon up the Republican candidate’s history of creative destruction, and tied that to the big story of the moment, the Occupy Wall Street protests. If Romney ends up becoming the Republican nominee, as still seems likely, the themes of Wallace-Wells’ profile will likely define the coming political year.
Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit argues, MacFarquhar writes, that “personal identity is not what matters.” But a profile is, by definition, an evocation of a person’s identity. How do you fulfill the requirements of the form on Parfit’s own, rather forbidding, terms? MacFarquhar didn’t make use of any scenes, or quotes of the traditional “he said” variety, conveying Parfit as a sort of disembodied intelligence. By all rights, this experiment should have been about as interesting to read as, well, a philosophy textbook. But the power of Parfit’s ideas about the nature of consciousness and ethics—and MacFarquhar’s skill at conveying them colloquially—made the piece sing to me.
Are you interested in reading about a shadowy industry that attempts to predict and profit from gigantic, multibillion-dollar disasters? Great—me too. Now that I’ve got you interested, I will disclose that this article is actually about the reinsurance industry. This is the bait-and-switch trick that Greeley pulls off admirably in this piece. This was the cover story for Businessweek’s 9-11 anniversary issue, and aided by some very good cover art—something the magazine has been justly praised for lately—the piece managed to tell its readers a story that touched on the past while telling them something new.
A detective story masquerading as a celebrity profile—or maybe it’s the other way around?—this was in an issue that kind of hung around on my endtable for a few months before I got around to sticking it into my bag for a long plane flight. Then it completely sucked me into its world. I won’t even pretend that I’m young enough to care about the rap collective Odd Future, or the fate of its missing member Earl Sweatshirt, but the outcome of this story, which I won’t spoil, offered an (ahem) oddly plaintive reminder that so many of our musical idols are, after all, just kids.
This was my absolute favorite story of the year. Journalism from Africa often conveys the continent in broadly collective terms: tribes rival with one another, rebels fight the government, the downtrodden suffer or rise up. Bearak, who used to be stationed in the Times’ Johannesburg bureau, took one of those distressing mass phenomena that fill the inside pages of every day’s newspaper—an outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa’s township slums—and gave the story a terrible specificity. I particularly admired the way Bearak dissected the chance intersections and misunderstandings that led to a lynching, and dispassionately explained the cosmological worldview of the victim’s family about his death. In the end, Bearak resists the natural tendency to isolate a single villain and hold that person up to condemnation, despite the murky evidence, because that’s what the mob did, albeit in an incomparably more brutal fashion.
Bonus: Longreads Logrolling List
I’m lucky enough to be friends with a bunch of really talented writers, and it seems a shame to exclude them simply on the grounds of our acquaintance. So, here’s a list of really great articles written this year by people that I happen to know and like. You can take these endorsements with a grain of salt, of course, but I urge you to click and judge for yourself.
The Gulf oil spill turned out to be less overwhelmingly catastrophic than some doomsayers predicted, but it still left behind some troubling lessons. This is the story of a disaster that happened beneath the surface, and in conveying that narrative with great depth and nuance, the story pulls off a truly difficult feat.
I’m a thousand percent certain that I’ll wake up in a cold sweat tonight, having suddenly remembered a slew of tremendous stories that I really should have given some year-end love. With that important caveat, I do hope you’ll check out the five tales below; each one is guaranteed to occupy a hallowed place in your brain.
I was sorely tempted to fulfill my New Yorker quota by shouting out David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold,” about the assassination of a powerful Guatemalan attorney. As with all Grann stories, I literally cut that piece apart with a pair of scissors, then pinned the various sections to a cork board in an effort to better understand his mastery of structure. But Anderson’s account of the Tamil Tigers’ violent twilight gets the nod, primarily because it features the year’s most chilling scene: an alleged female spy is dragged in front of the author by a louche guerrilla commander, then carted away to be shot in the head. That brief passage may well be the most vivid description of casual brutality ever committed to the page.
The official story was that surfing superstar Andy Irons died of dengue fever, allegedly contracted during a competition in Bali. But the reality, carefully concealed by friends and family alike, was that Irons was an addict, one whose self-destructive habits had nearly killed him at least once before. Melekian’s heartbreaking story illustrates how the deeply troubled Irons was failed by those around him, who felt that no real harm could possibly come to such a prodigiously talented athlete.
When I first read this story, about the young activists who helped launch Egypt’s revolution, I was bowled over by the characters’ bravery and gumption—it’s no small thing to risk torture for the sake of righteous principles. But in light of how Egypt’s political situation has changed in recent weeks, the piece reads quite differently now—you can see the haziness of the activists’ idealism, and perhaps even a dash of arrogance in their tactics. The fact that “The Instigators” contains such varied narrative strands at its core is a testament to its expert craftsmanship and deep reporting. And the use of video in the iPad version is an object lesson in how storytelling can be enriched by digital technology—one brief glimpse of the central character in the thick of the protests adds volumes to the yarn.
Confessional writing seems so easy in theory, especially since there is seldom any original reporting involved. But, man, is it ever hard to pull off with any appreciable degree of success. The vast majority of such stories get bogged down in artificial sentiment or cheesy philosophizing. But that’s not the case with Baker’s glorious tale of adolescent mendacity, in which she recounts a minor scam she ran on an older guy—a scam that ended in hilariously embarrassing fashion. As The Great Gatsby showed, there are limits to America’s tolerance for personal reinvention, a lesson that Baker had to learn the hard way. But there is also solace to be had in the company of like-minded souls, a task now easier than ever thanks to the power of the Internet—a realm that, as Baker so eloquently puts it, provides “a clean, well-lighted place for your real self.”
The Homicide Report, an online project of The Los Angeles Times, tabulates and describes every single killing in my native city. When it first began, I focused on the brief accounts of each death—there’s no better way to be overwhelmed by the senselessness of daily violence. But I’ve since become a devotee of the project’s comments, which are frequently provided by acquaintances of the deceased—as well as blog regulars who possess, shall we say, hard hearts. When those two sides clash, the resulting mess makes for some epic reading. This year’s best example is the thread that follows the entry on Michael Nida, killed by the Downey police in bizarre circumstances. Was he involved in a bank robbery? Targeted because of his race? The victim of out-of-control cops? The commenters battle it out, and in doing so provide a snapshot of the fundamental beliefs that divide us. The comments admittedly contain large heapings of idiocy, insensitivity, and racism. But keep reading—the unabashed rawness of the views on display is what makes the “story” so compelling.
2011 was a banner year for long-form journalism and storytelling on the web, and correlatively a time to appreciate people like Mark who have propelled the Longreads movement forward. I love how this site started as a hashtag on a soundbite-filled medium like Twitter, pulling away the noise to highlight the words and weightier pieces that engaged us all. It has never been easier to find something good to read.
And as I travel, I find myself connecting the dots between disparate countries or foods, drawing parallels within the stories I digest as I go. It’s extremely hard to whittle down the many fantastic pieces this year to a short list, but the pieces I’ve picked below are ones that had a significant impact, and are now baked into my memories of the places where they were read.
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1) The Man who Sailed His House (GQ): This piece could have been written matter-of-factly or reported as the news that it was at its base level: a man, lost at sea after Japan’s devastating tsunami, is finally rescued days later. Instead, Michael Paterniti’s beautiful prose turns this astonishing tale into the surreal, raising it above anything else I’ve read about Hiromitsu Shinkawa. Through the patchwork of photos from the tsunami and its vast scale of destruction, the sincere humanity of this story is not something you want to miss. [Read it in: Casablanca, Morocco]
2) In the New Gangland of El Salvador (New York Review of Books): I’ve been a fan of Alma Guillermoprieto’s ability to tell a heartbreaking story with grace for quite some time, and her longread about El Salvador is no exception. Returning to El Salvador after 30 years, the piece swings between descriptive travelogue and somber reporting, digging into the history of the country’s ferocious gangs and why they are so prevalent. [Read it in: Montreal, Canada]
3) The Possibilian (The New Yorker): I first discovered David Eagleman when I read Sum, 40 short stories about an imaginary afterlife. At times funny, at times sad and each packing a punch in a short two-page read, I’ve been foisting Sum on those learning English as the creativity and short chapters make it an ideal learning book. So it was fascinating to learn more about Eagleman and his own brush with death, how he has collected hundreds of stories like his, and how “they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down.” In Burkhard Bilger’s wonderful profile of the quirky neuroscientist, not only do we get insight into how and why Eagleman writes the way he does, but we learn about the philosophies behind his prose and how his own history naturally braids in, pushing him further to take risks beyond most of our comfort levels. [Read it in: Chiang Mai, Thailand]
4) Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert (The Awl): I have Wikipedia bookmarked on both mobile and laptops, and it’s an argument-solver, fact-checker (with a pinch of salt) and using the random article generator, a great way to learn about new things you had no idea existed. In her Awl piece, the talented Maria Bustillos discussed the pros and cons of the service, noting that “Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic.” Instead of being told how it is, you’re given the facts to make your own editorial decision. Great read. [Read it in: Bangkok, Thailand]
5) Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus (Orion Magazine): One of the more unusual and vaguely discomfiting pieces of the year (“Am I really sympathizing with the brain of an octopus? Yes, yes I am”), Sy Montgomery’s loving investigation of animal we often eat but rarely personify was a wonder to read. Whether talking about the study of octopus intellect, the description of octopus behaviour or Montgomery’s awe as he spends time with a 40-pound giant Pacific octopus, I couldn’t put it down. I’ll never look at octopuses the same way again. [Read it in: Istanbul, Turkey]
Bonus reads (hard to pick only five!)
1) Breaking Caste (The Globe and Mail): Veteran journalist Stephanie Nolen reports on Sudha Varghese, the remarkable woman who built a school for the Dalit girls (India’s Untouchable caste), giving them new hope. Nolen’s writing style and obvious research make the piece that much more interesting to read and her background section on Varghese’s life gives the story an additional human connection. [Read it in: London, England]
2) When Irish Eyes are Crying (Vanity Fair): With Moneyball‘s marketing campaign in full force and Boomerang on the shelves, Michael Lewis is everywhere these days. However back in March when Vanity Fair published his longread on the Irish financial crisis, his buzz had yet to crescendo. The piece sets out the background and confluence of factors that led to the Irish economic crash, as well as some unpopular opinions on how it could have been avoided. Very interesting read. [Read it in: Mae Hong Son, Thailand]
3) My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (The New York Times): Brave piece from Jose Antonio Vargas “coming out” as someone who has worked as a journalist and award-winning writer for years, all while hiding that he was not legally permitted to do so in the United States. Living this otherworld reality meant that Vargas went about his days in fear of being found out, something he had spent years trying to avoid. Vargas attributes his decision to share the true story after reading about four students who walked from Miami to Washington to lobby for the Dream Act. [Read it in: New York, NY]
These were the results of a poll of all New York Times Magazine staff—edit, art, photo & production. We decided to do two lists: ‘Them’ and ‘Us,’ and hopefully that doesn’t get us in trouble with the Longreads governing body.
THEM
These were the consensus picks of the staff, with only a little executive tampering. Such as: We decided at the last moment to semi-cheat and put Amy Harmon on the list. Though she is an “us” and not a “them,” we didn’t know a thing about her story until we read it in the newspaper, just like everybody else, and it was too good to leave off a year-end list. You will notice that Paul Ford’s essay fills the “our list is not the same as every other list” slot, but that is not, we swear, the reason it made the cut. It probably provoked as much conversation in our office as any single story this year. It is pure pleasure to read. By the way, we loved a lot from The New Yorker, and we could have justifiably filled all 5 slots with their stories. Though, of course, we would never do that. Also, there will be one staff member made very upset by the exclusion of “Travis the Menace,” by Dan P. Lee in New York magazine. Sorry, pal.
Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) is the founder of Nieman Storyboard. She is also writing what she hopes will be a very surprising book about Vladimir Nabokov.
***
I’m contrary by nature. So when I sat down to pick my Longreads for 2011, I reviewed the lists that Mark had published to date and decided not to include a single story that had already been chosen. Which meant some obvious candidates were off the table from the beginning: no Lawrence Wright on Scientology, no Keith Gessen on Kazakhstan. No Allie Broshie. No John Jeremiah Sullivan. But see for yourself—the following pieces shine just as brightly.
Autopsies on the brains of hockey and football players have been making big news lately. But here, Laskas checks in on the life of a former NFL linebacker to see what it’s like for mentally-impaired players who are still alive. Welcome to Dementia—it’s a funny, terrifying place.
A vigilante murder launches this story, and the reporter’s investigation of it spirals into a tale of cowardice and cruelty. “He was a wayward teenager, a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy,” Bearak writes of one character, plunging into everything that follows. Race, xenophobia, money, and history make themselves felt in a way that never dulls the humanity—beautiful or horrifying—of the people Bearak portrays.
One of the biggest joys of running a music store in Washington, DC, during my college years was that my co-workers were gloriously unembarrassed. Want to groove to Pet Shop Boys and Black Flag? No problem. Asking for that promo copy of A Tribe Called Quest to take home with the k.d. lang you bought today? Go for it. I had a saying then: “You love what you love,” which is insipid. But this article is what I meant. So short it has to stand on tiptoe to be a Longreads, Dolnick’s piece contains perhaps the most honest sentence ever written by a critic: “Taste doesn’t work for reason; reason is a skinny underpaid clerk in the office of taste.”
Ronson motors along, encouraging you to snicker at a cavalcade of real-world wannabe superheroes headed up by Seattle’s Phoenix Jones. Then the story takes a hairpin turn, and you can’t imagine what happens next.
There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. What it means is this: You take the most intimate, difficult, unseemly moments from your own life. You look to see if anyone else has experienced anything like them. You look for what you have in common with those people — your gender, your socioeconomic status, your career, your race. And then, you speak about what that means for the world.
“The personal is political” is how the unspeakable, “private” issues of women—the men in the radical protest group who made rape jokes, the arrogant dismissals at the mostly-boy punk rock shows, the boss who made weird sexual comments, the date who raped you, the husband who beat you—became political concerns. It’s how “my problem” becomes “our problem.” It’s the catalyst for bringing marginalized experiences to light, and for finally understanding that it’s not happening because of who you are; it’s happening because of what you are, and that is something else entirely. Something which all of the people in your “what” have a vested interest in changing.
“The personal is political” is also, I eventually came to realize, the essential factor in all of the essays I remembered from 2011. The pieces I’ve chosen are all about personal matters, in one way or another, and they all address huge social problems by focusing on one woman’s specific experience. They all raise questions without easy answers: About the identity of the reporter, and how that plays a role in what he or she reports; about whether personal responses to trauma can be evaluated in political terms; about how our identities come into conflict, and how to create a workable solidarity; about who we are, who we think we are, and who we would like others to think we are, and what the distance between those three things might be. In every case, I was struck by the author’s candor, bravery, and willingness to say some very uncomfortable things in public. And in every case, these pieces—and the reactions to them—taught me something new about how to see the world.
Kirsten Ostrenga was a lonely, home-schooled fourteen-year-old who started a MySpace page to connect with people. Four years later, she was receiving daily messages calling her things along the lines of “rape-enjoying pathetic bitch,” she was receiving other messages from middle-aged men who wanted to fuck her, she was being impersonated online by dozens of people, she had her house vandalized, she had her cat disappear shortly after someone threatened to kill it, she had been punched in the face by a “fan” posing for a picture with her, she had been raped, and she had been publicly called a “murderer” in connection with the death of her rapist, who tripped and fell while fleeing the police who were there to arrest him for raping Kirsten. That rapist also happened to be her first boyfriend. They’d met through MySpace.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about all this is harrowing and astonishingly empathetic; the month it came out, I read it about ten or fifteen times. It’s not only about “Internet bullying,” or sexual violence, or even Kirsten Ostrenga; it’s also about the difficult-to-measure, often profound distance between Internet persona and person, and what we hope to find by making our lives public. Read it, and see if your voice doesn’t sound a little quieter the next time you go to write a snippy blog post about some public figure—if you don’t find yourself pulling certain punches, or asking whether you really know, or can ever know, what they’re actually going through at the moment. There are a lot of big magazine articles about Young People And The Internet. This year, no one did it better than Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
I always think of these two pieces as connected to each other, so that’s how I recommend you read them. They’re both about violence, and the ways that violence can change you. They’re both painful to read. And they’re both notable for being comprised of about ten separate things that female journalists, or feminists, are never supposed to say in public. Whitefield-Madrano writes about visiting the emergency room, after her boyfriend beat her up, with blood streaming down her face. “The only words that make sense are the ones that spill out of my mouth over and over again,” she says, “the only words that will let the receptionist and the nurses and my friends and my parents know that this isn’t what it looks like, that I’m not one of those women, those women in abusive relationships, those women who can’t help themselves enough to get out: I went to college, I went to college, I went to college.” Meanwhile, McClelland leads with “It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint,” and goes on from there.
Whitefield-Madrano was a feminist who organized Take Back the Night marches, published op-eds criticizing “the notion that a woman’s greatest personal threat lay outside the home,” and stayed in her relationship after her boyfriend started to hit her. McClelland was a human rights journalist whose job was to faithfully witness the pain of others; after being threatened with rape in Haiti, and witnessing the aftermath of severe sexual violence, she contracted post-traumatic stress disorder and needed her ex-boyfriend to simulate a rape with her as part of her recovery. Both women focus, to a large degree, on the internal aftereffects of the trauma. McClelland gagged and vomited, cried constantly, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop drinking. Whitefield-Madrano missed work, forgot her own phone number, moved in a permanent daze: “I’d been depressed before, and this was different. This was a fog of having no idea who I was, where I’d gone, or if I might return.”
And they both produced astonishingly skilled, un-self-indulgent pieces of writing out of those experiences. (This was particularly easy to miss in the backlash to McClelland’s piece, which ranged from legitimate concerns—her representation of Haiti, her treatment of sources—to publishing her ex-boyfriend’s full name and place of employment, calling her a “geisha,” and claiming that she was somehow faking her PTSD to get attention and/or a book deal.) The experiences of trauma, abuse and post-traumatic stress are often literally impossible to describe. The very nature of what they call an “acute stress response”—“a feeling of detachment, disorientation, inability to concentrate or respond sensibly;” “the mind ‘going blank’;” “the person appears to be out of contact with others but is not unconscious;” these are symptoms, which sound fairly mild until you realize (as I once did, in my own experience of traumatic shock) that the strange hollow object by the metal basin is a cup, and is intended to hold water, which is why it is by the sink, and that you have been figuring this out for twenty minutes, ever since you set the cup down there—induces a fundamental disconnect from language. McClelland and Whitefield-Madrano plunge us into that experience with their nightmarish descriptions, but they also analyze it in lucid detail. It’s a remarkable achievement: Two clear, rational, coherent accounts of what it’s like to lose coherence, clarity, and reason.
For about a month this fall, every single professional journalist who cared about social justice or protest in any way whatsoever was busy writing or filing their Pieces On Occupy Wall Street. None of us wrote a better piece than Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who initially posted this on her personal, semi-private Facebook page.
Covering protests is tricky. You don’t want to undermine or demonize them by reporting the wrong scenes or speaking to the wrong people. You don’t want to gloss over their problems by ignoring the less flattering facts on the ground. You don’t always know, frankly, whether you are there to report or support, and depending on what happens to you—as in the case of the writers who went to Occupy Wall Street to protest, and wound up filing pieces about getting arrested; or, the other writers who went to report, and wound up being victimized by the police like any other protester—that role can change within the space of an hour.
And I will be even more frank with you: In the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes felt that I was seeing a lot of supporting, and not always enough reporting. It was communal, it was wonderful, it was revolutionary, absolutely no-one was smoking any pot whatsoever because that was a right-wing lie, everyone was so equal, etc. It was usually only on the smaller blogs that you could find stories like McCleave Maharawal’s: Men “dancing up on” women at drum circles without consent, radical activists responding to education about gender pronouns with outright bafflement, people of color being told to direct their concerns to someone’s email inbox rather than bringing them up at General Assembly, a man including a line about there being “one race, the human race, formerly divided by race, class,” etc., in the promotional materials, and responding to objections (namely that we were hardly “formerly” divided on those fronts) with “[it’s] scientifically true.” McCleave Maharawal was not “just” writing a personal essay; she was performing a public service, by giving people a genuinely nuanced view of the occupation. But this is not an anti-Occupy piece. It is not an attack piece. And it is not an example of undermining. Precisely because she was willing to cover the gritty and sometimes unflattering details of how solidarity was actually being worked out among “the 99%” at Occupy Wall Street, McCleave Maharawal actually wrote a far more convincing and meaningful argument for it than I had yet read. It’s a model for anyone who wants to advocate—for a cause, for a community, for a protest, for an idea—without slipping into boosterism; for anyone who wants to speak about the facts on the ground, without losing sight of what those facts really mean.
2011 was, in many ways, the Year Of Unpleasant Conversations About Odd Future. The group just brings up a lot of sticky subjects: The relationship between art and artist, the relationship between creation and social responsibility for what one has created, the white fear of black masculinity, men’s disregard for violence against women. And, you know what? Those conversations were just as unpleasant for me as they were for you. I don’t exactly look forward to having any of them again.
But, if I ever teach that long-imagined seminar on Journalism, Pop Culture, and Gender, I think our final assignment is going to consist of a 10-page paper on the difference between two short passages in two reviews of the exact same show: Amos Barshad’s “Odd Future Live Show Surpasses the Hype,” for Rolling Stone, and Emma Carmichael’s “With the Ladies In The Back at an Odd Future Show,” for The Awl. In fact, let’s just do that now. Better one?
At one point, a fresh-faced blond girl roughly the same age as Tyler landed on the stage and accosted him for a kiss; he complied, wondered aloud if he might now have herpes and then tossed her off, too.
Or better two?
[Just] after two in the morning, a blonde girl surfed her way onstage and kissed Tyler, who announced, “I might legit have herpes.” The crowd laughed and started a “show your titties” chant, and she refused, looking bashful. “Then get the fuck off the stage!” Tyler yelled.
Class: Which of these passages was written by a man? How can you tell? Which writer made note of whether the girl in question was attractive (“fresh-faced”), and how do you think cultural norms around gender, presentation and gaze affected this choice? What is the difference between “accosted [Tyler]” and “kissed Tyler;” who is portrayed as an aggressor in each of these passages, how does it differ between passages, and what does that mean? Why did both writers choose to describe the girl as “blonde,” and which cultural narratives are supported by that choice? Would your answer be different if the writers substituted “white” for “blonde?” How? Do you think Amos Barshad joined in the “show us your titties” chant? If not, why didn’t he tell us that it happened? Are you really angry right now? At whom, and why, and what does that tell you? Please remember to demonstrate in your response that the personal is political. Papers due whenever you think you know what all of this means, and can say it. I might never turn mine in.
This piece just blew me away, and I’m not even a DFW devotee (I’ve yet to tackle any of his books). To go to his library, to transcribe notes from his journals and books, to make it all make sense — incredible. I was as in awe of Maria’s devotion to her subject as I was of the subject itself.
I’m a Sugar devotee; her columns have been such a help to me during a rough year. This one, in which five women ask Sugar what to do about their relationships that aren’t working, is particularly great (that last line slays).
Anne’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” series is top notch. I was reared on old films and tend to long for “the good old days,” so it’s a good splash in the face to have the veneer ripped off. I love Petersen’s style; her combination of fact and colloquial candor is so much fun. (Behold: “At this point, Hudson looked very much as he would for the rest of his life, which is to say he looked like a Ken doll with a dye job. The same classic good looks, the same soft, inviting smile. But dude could not act FOR SHIT.”)
Oh, gosh. Sady writes these vignettes of her life with such honesty, clarity, and insight, that it’s incredible to remember that she is a young woman and these moments aren’t that far gone. This one had me thinking for days, and I sent it to everyone I knew, pleading with them to read it.
Incredibly brave piece; it gives me chills to think all that Jose risked to write this. I can’t imagine anyone reading this and still arguing for the automatic deportation of undocumented immigrants. (Also: I consider Terry Gross’s Fresh Air Interview with Jose an essential companion piece to this one).
BONUS PRINT PICKS: The interviews that run in each issue of The Sun Magazine aren’t published in full online, but I love them and I’d like to tell you about them. I am a person who likes to learn things and think about stuff, and these interviews deliver. Full text is not available online (even to subscribers), but the excerpts are substantial enough that you should know if you need to go to the new stand and get educated (just do it).
Kramer can almost make you smell and taste the stuff she’s picking: mint, asparagus, fennel, mushrooms. Plus, maybe my favorite lead sentence of the year: “I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes.”
I kind of didn’t want to like this piece, but Franzen’s assessment of “consumer technology products,” and our fraught relationships with them, feels right on.
As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, it was heartbreaking to read this chronicle of how the Giants’ greatest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, have gone from one of the most respected organizations in sports to one of the most dysfunctional.
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