Search Results for: Financial Times

There’s No Way Hannah Can Afford That Apartment

Lena Dunham on the set of Girls (HBO)
Lena Dunham on the set of Girls (HBO)

I worked retail, selling art supplies, when Friends was insanely popular. I lived in a tiny studio — they’d call it micro-housing now — and I got by. I quit when I was hired as a caption writer. It paid three times what my retail job paid, though it was still not a lot of money. I moved into a two bedroom duplex with a friend, and I continued to get by. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I didn’t have a lot of expenses, either.

But it was not New York City, it was Seattle on the front edge of the tech boom, and it was still cheap. It always bothered me that Monica, a line cook, and Rachel, a barista — and not, I think, a very good one — had that spectacular apartment. Joey and Chandler’s place seemed a bit more believable, though I imagine Chandler was always having to front Joey at least part of his rent.

And now I’m on about Friends, when I mean to be on about Girls, which has the same maddening practical issue. How do they pay their rent?

On The Billfold, Emily Meg Weinstein compares Girls creator Lena Dunham’s own experience with that of her main character, Hannah Horvath. Weinstein provides real world economic context for what it means to be a working creative and — spoiler alert — single mother.

Dunham has never been a struggling artist. She has played one on TV. This may be one reason that Girls is not remotely realistic about the earnings of a freelance writer — no one involved in the making of the show has ever been, or even bothered to talk to, one. The real Dunham has published frequently in the New Yorker, and got a multimillion-dollar book deal in her mid-twenties. Still, she imagines a different existence.

In the episode in which Hannah decides to have the baby, we see her type on her computer a list of reasons not to do it, among them the fact that she earns “$24K” a year.” I publish with a frequency similar to Hannah’s, in similar publications. I would be thrilled to earn twenty-four thousand dollars a year from my writing, but I earn barely a tenth of that. Like most writers, I support my writing by doing another job. (Over 90% of my income comes from a tutoring business I have run since I was twenty-one.)

TL;DR: It ain’t happening.

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File, Deduct, Hide: Six Essential Stories About Taxes

A seasonal "Statue of Liberty" waver for Liberty Tax walks down the streets of Janesville, Wisconsin. (Anthony Wahl / The Janesville Gazette via AP)

Today is Day 85 of the Trump Administration, and like a sailor condemned to four years at sea we carry on, stooped and weary from the weight of this albatross around our necks—Donald Trump’s taxes.

We know they exist—but what does their existence even mean any more? We’ve seen a few pages here and there, sent as proof of life to the New York Times and waved around by Rachel Maddow. In a bid to bring attention to President Trump’s noteworthy silence on his financial position, a tax march will take place on April 15 worldwide in response to a single tweet by a Vermont law professor.

Taxes are at once no one’s business and everyone’s business. We all pay them: how we pay them, what they are used for, what we want them to be used for, and what the government would rather do with them instead, is the Great American Story.

1. “Tax Time” (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, November 2012)

Lepore takes the long view on taxes with a history of how the U.S. decided to levy an income tax. It’s easy to dismiss taxes, she argues, and much harder to defend them. But that’s not a problem our ancestors shared—despite opposition to King George’s levy on goods like tea, the founding fathers had no problem squeezing the rich with large indirect taxes for market exchanges such as imports. More than a century later, the constitutional amendment that made income tax the law of the land wasn’t even an issue in Congress. But taxes have since become a bone of endless contention, especially as they concern how much rich and poor should pay. Lepore weaves a deft story to tell us exactly why.

Taxes dominate domestic politics. They didn’t always. Since the nineteen-seventies, almost all of that talk has been about cuts, which ought to be surprising, because more than ninety per cent of Americans receive social or economic security benefits from the federal government. Americans, though, find it easier to see what they pay than what they get—not because they aren’t paying attention but because the case for taxation is so seldom made.

2. “Too Rich to Live?” (Laura Saunders and Mary Pilon, The Wall Street Journal, July 2010)

One of the most hotly contested forms of taxation is the estate tax, when a dead person’s estate is transferred to another person. Though the idea is thousands of years old and the American permutation has been around in some form or another for a century, the tax was gradually phased out starting in 2001. But when it came back in 2011—the product of impermanent legislation—the rich who stood to lose the most from the transfer of their substantial assets bucked.

It didn’t matter; the tax became permanent in 2013. But when Saunders and Pilon interviewed dying people and their potential heirs on the eve of the tax’s return, they found a strange phenomenon—people who make life-or-death decisions about their health and end-of-life care based on the potential of saving their heirs money on taxes.

In 2009, more than a few dying people struggled to live into 2010 in hopes of preserving assets for their heirs. Clara Laub, a widow who helped her husband build a Fresno, Calif., grape farm from 20 acres into more than 900 acres worth several million dollars, was diagnosed with advanced cancer in October, 2009. Her daughter Debbie Jacobsen, who helps run the farm, says her mother struggled to live past December and died on New Year’s morning: “She made my son promise to tell her the date and time every day, even if we wouldn’t,” Mrs. Jacobsen says.

In New York the lapsing tax spawned a major family conflict, according to one attorney. As a wealthy patriarch lay dying at the end of the year, it became clear that under the terms of the will his children would receive more if he died in 2010, while his wife (not the children’s mother) stood to benefit if he died in 2009. The wife then filed a “do not resuscitate” order and the children challenged it. The patriarch lived a few days into 2010, but his estate, like Mrs. Laub’s, remains unsettled given the legislative uncertainty.

3. “The Throwaways” (Melissa Chadburn, The Rumpus, January 2012)

Taxes are a matter of life and death not just to the wealthy, but to the people who need tax-funded social services to survive. Chadburn, who endured horrific abuse and a traumatic stint in foster care, considers what taxes mean to the people she calls “the throwaways,” those who depend on the small sums of money that anti-taxation advocates fight not to have to pay. As disparities between poor and rich grow, she argues, taxation can be seen as a revolutionary lifesaving act, a statement about the very worth of the people it helps.

Strangely, it was for dreams like these—the simplest dreams of rest, of feeling, of safety—that I first began to look at taxes. Taxes are the tool that makes these dreams of ours possible. Shelter for everyone, food for everyone, taxes ensure public safety. And what about love? Love is given and received. Love is not a solitary act. Love requires people to commune with one another.

My previous associations with taxes were shame and guilt and trickery. Then I looked at my history with money and public funding in general. Some people have argued that we are a nation of self-interested people. People who only care about themselves. Their own well-being.

I disagree. I think we are better than that but have been assaulted by the overwhelming personification of Greed….It’s our first lesson in pain.

4. “Tax Hero” (Planet Money, NPR, March 2017)

Despite the stakes of taxation, the act of filing taxes can be unbearably mundane. But there’s a darker side to doing taxes—the poor pay a disproportionate amount to tax preparation firms that gouge them on relatively simple filings. Enter Joseph Bankman, a Stanford tax law professor who thought he’d figured out a simpler way. But as Planet Money reveals, simpler isn’t always better for those who benefit from the current, complex system. His fight for painless filing became a legislative battle—and his opponents were a strange coalition of their own.

5. “Mossack Fonseca: Inside the Firm That Helps the Super-Rich Hide Their Money” (Luke Harding, The Guardian, April 2016)

While your average Joe struggles to pay the tax preparers, there’s a shadowy world of ultra-wealthy corporations and individuals who’ll do anything they can to not pay taxes at all. Last year, the lid on one of these complex tax-avoidance schemes blew open when 11.5 million documents—now known as the Panama Papers—were leaked, revealing inside information on over 200,000 offshore shell corporations that exist to help the one percent sidestep their tax obligations.

The Guardian won a Pulitzer for their groundbreaking investigation of the Panama Papers (Here’s a breakdown of how they got the scoop—and an in-depth podcast that tells the entire sordid story behind their award-winning investigation.) One of their most fascinating stories was about Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that helped the rich find tax-friendly parking places for their cash. Harding tells the story of a company that’s part financial services provider, part peddler of international intrigue—one that’s marketed directly to Americans with money to hide.

Mossack Fonseca’s leaked emails reveal the extraordinary measures that some of its well-heeled clients took to keep their financial affairs secret. Especially the Europeans and Americans, who have latterly found themselves under scrutiny from their own governments.

One theme that emerges is anxiety. Wealthy individuals with “undeclared” offshore bank accounts are afraid they might get rumbled.

Another theme is victimhood. The super-rich, it appears, feel they are being unfairly picked on—persecuted even.

6. “Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found” (David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, and Megan Twohey, The New York Times, October 2016)

What happens when a tax evader is not an average citizen but the President of the United States? Of course, the answer is “we don’t know yet,” because we have no idea what’s in Donald Trump’s personal tax returns. Despite Rachel Maddow’s overhyped scoop on a few pages from Trump’s 2005 return, nobody’s been able to get ahold of what could be the most sought-after documents in modern history. And thus, we don’t know what wealth the President has to brag about—or hide.

After receiving several pages from Trump’s 1995 returns from an anonymous source, Barstow, Craig, Buettner, and Twohey hypothesized that back when he was a mere real estate mogul, the president used a $916 million business loss to cancel out his tax debt for decades. Is it true? Until Trump comes forward with his tax returns, there’s no way to know. But journalists won’t stop piecing the story together—and if the tax march is any indication, citizens won’t stop insisting that he tell the truth about his financial situation.

But the most important revelation from the 1995 tax documents is just how much Mr. Trump may have benefited from a tax provision that is particularly prized by America’s dynastic families, which, like the Trumps, hold their wealth inside byzantine networks of partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations.

The provision, known as net operating loss, or N.O.L., allows a dizzying array of deductions, business expenses, real estate depreciation, losses from the sale of business assets and even operating losses to flow from the balance sheets of those partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations onto the personal tax returns of men like Mr. Trump. In turn, those losses can be used to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income from, say, book royalties or branding deals.

 

Popular Enough to Live: A Reading List About Crowdfunding Health Care

Postman76 / Flickr

I’m part of the 63 percent of Americans who don’t have money to cover an emergency costing $500 or more. I don’t own a car or a house, so in the unlikely event of the aforementioned emergency (knock on wood for me, please), my personal crisis would be health expenses uncovered by Medicaid. Like the people you’ll meet in the following stories, I too would turn to crowdfunding.

Everyone, in my opinion, deserves healthcare coverage, and crowdfunding shines a spotlight on the insufficiency of the United States healthcare system. It also demonstrates that the internet is far from democratic. Crowdfunding takes time, energy, and a knack for marketing. Not everyone has these privileges or skills, and when it comes to paying medical bills or seeking life-saving surgeries, that chasm can be fatal.

1. “Sometimes, It Does Hurt to Ask” by Caitlin Cruz (Digg, January 2017)

Just today, a trans man I follow on Instagram posted a picture of the letter he received in the mail saying his health insurance would not cover his top surgery. For trans and gender non-conforming people, the cost of life-affirming medications and operations are steep—financially, physically, and spiritually. According to GLAAD, 19 percent of transgender people don’t have any form of health insurance. Hormone therapy and gender confirmation surgeries can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, many trans people have turned to the internet, using PayPal donations or hosting YouCaring or GoFundMe campaigns, to ask their friends, families, and total strangers for financial assistance.

2. “Is It Fair to Ask the Internet to Pay Your Hospital Bill?” by Cari Romm (The Atlantic, March 2015)

Donating to a medical crowdfunding campaign requires donors to be at once more intimate with and more judgmental of the recipients. At its most basic and most callous, the act of giving boils down something not unlike comparison shopping: Who, out of all the people who have shared their tragedy on the Internet, is the most deserving of money? And, before that, who can entice donors to click?

As medical crowdfunding has become more popular, so too has the idea of its so-called “perfect victim,” said Margaret Moon, a bioethicist and professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University: the person whose inability to pay for their care came down to sheer bad luck—and bad coverage, if they had any insurance at all. “They’d done everything right, they’d explored all the possibilities and were still left short,” she said. “The people donating to these sites don’t know if somebody’s made a request because they just couldn’t figure out their insurance, or because their insurance failed them. Wouldn’t you be more willing to donate to someone who had played out their insurance?”

3. “Who Should Pay for Evan Karr’s Heart?” by Anne Helen Petersen  (BuzzFeed, March 2017)

Evan Karr is a a precocious 13 year old Kentuckian who was born with tetralogy of Fallot, a heart defect. Evan has had three heart surgeries, and at the top of Petersen’s story, he’s gearing up for a fourth.

4. “The Real Peril of Crowdfunding Health Care” by Anne Helen Petersen (BuzzFeed, March 2017)

Most of the successful campaigns on a crowdfunding homepage fall under the rubric of “fighting unfairness,” a designation that expands to include one of GoFundMe’s most successful campaigns of all time (for Standing Rock) but mostly signifies struggles against diseases that seemingly strike at random: cancer, genetic disorders, and other afflictions ostensibly out of the victim’s control. Such conditions are often referred to as “faultless.”

It’s far harder to fund so-called “blameworthy” diseases—addiction and mental health in particular—that are popularly conceived as either the fault of the victim or somehow under their control. You rarely see campaigns for adult heart disease, for example, or “getting my life together as a single mom”—both are viewed as the result of “choices” instead of “needs.” If there’s already a hierarchy of affliction and need in this country, then crowdfunding often works to exacerbate it.

5. “Go Viral or Die Trying”  by Luke O’ Neil, Esquire, March 2017)

Luke O’Neil’s feature for Esquire opens with an anecdote about Kati McFarland, a 25-year-old young woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome who turned to crowdfunding to offset the cost of medical care. McFarland garnered national attention when she confronted Sen. Tom Cotton about his perspective on the Affordable Care Act.

After reading several of these crowdfunding stories, I was feeling a little jaded. I couldn’t help but cringe at the following, from YouCaring’s director of online marketing:

“The secret prize for people who raise money on the site is they find out how much people care about them,” says YouCaring’s [Jesse] Boland. “The money is the primary ask but they end up being better off for having connected to their community, so they get a sense of peace and belonging.”

O’Neil also spoke to editors from Gizmodo, Uproxx, Upworthy, and the Washington Post about their experiences studying and spotlighting viral campaigns.

6. “Kickstarting a Cure”  by Noah Rosenberg (Narratively, July 2013)

Jimmy Lin is the founder of the Rare Genomics Institute, which he describes as “Amazon-slash-Kickstarter for science.” Lin’s organization matches families with researchers and geneticists from RGI affiliates and helps them raise money to cover the costs of expensive tests:

“The biggest thing we talk about with our team is, ‘If this was our child who was sick, what extent would we go to to help them?’” Lin says of RGI’s efforts. “If this was our kid that was sick, this is exactly what we’d do.”

The Immigration-Obsessed, Polarized, Garbage-Fire Election of 1800

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Images via Wikimedia Commons

A. Roger Ekirch | American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution | Pantheon | February 2017 | 33 minutes (8,149 words) 

Below is an excerpt from American Sanctuary, by A. Roger Ekirch.

For background, it is important to know that a seaman named Jonathan Robbins participated in a mutiny on the HMS Hermione in 1797, the bloodiest mutiny in British naval history. Afterward, he joined the American navy, but he was eventually recognized and jailed. To justify his actions, Robbins claimed he was an American citizen who had been impressed—that is, captured and forced into servitude—by the British navy. However, his American citizenship was disputed. The British sought his extradition, which the president, the Federalist John Adams, granted—an action which had disastrous political consequences for his party. Robbins was found guilty by a British naval court and hanged from the yardarm of the HMS Acasta in 1799.

This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. Read more…

The Slave Who Outwitted George Washington

The Washington Family, by Edward Savage, c. 1789 / Wikimedia

Erica Armstrong Dunbar | Never Caught: The Washingtons Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge | Atria / 37 Ink | March 2017 | 19 minutes (5,244 words)

***

MOUNT VERNON

Two years after the death of her owner, Betty learned her mistress was to remarry. She most likely received the news of her mistress’s impending second marriage with great wariness as word spread that Martha Custis’s intended was Colonel George Washington. The colonel was a fairly prominent landowner with a respectable career as a military officer and an elected member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. His marriage to the widowed Martha Custis would offer him instant wealth and the stability of a wife and family that had eluded him.

A huge yet necessary transition awaited Martha Custis as she prepared to marry and move to the Mount Vernon estate, nearly one hundred miles away. For Betty, as well as the hundreds of other slaves that belonged to the Custis estate, the death of their previous owner and Martha’s marriage to George Washington was a reminder of their vulnerability. It was often after the death of an owner that slaves were sold to remedy the debts held by an estate. Read more…

Follow the Oil Trail and You’ll Find the Girls

Photo property of Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

Riayn Spaero | Longreads | March 2017 | 14 minutes (2,400 words)

 

Duluth, Minnesota was dank and barren. Ice and mounted snow covered Lake Superior, save for scattered pools of howling waves. I picked this time because the ships weren’t in and wouldn’t be for several weeks. It was, for the moment, safe to stand by that great lake and speak on the silent affliction it routinely ushers to Duluth’s shores—the very same affliction that will spread across four states and infect each Dakota Access Pipeline construction site. I was there to meet Sarah Curtiss, an esteemed Anishinaabe activist at Men As Peacemakers, who’d agreed to an on-camera interview to discuss the predatory violence on this lake and other locations throughout Indian Country, such as oil fields and pipeline camps, that threaten the lives and bodies of Indigenous women on a daily basis. She wasn’t my first documentary interview on this subject, yet my hair raised in anticipation of absorbing more horrific accounts and the immense responsibility of honoring her every word.

Curtiss shook my hand and sighed. Her exhale eased my nerves. “You wouldn’t believe some of the questions I’ve been asked,” she said. “I once had this woman, a reporter, say ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you’re Indian?’”

Curtiss is astute, so I would not put it past her to pop this icebreaker as a litmus quiz for non-people of color documentarians (or journalists), but for me that morning it was an invitation to an honest interview built on trust in our convergent, but different, American experiences as “other.” Her last name, Curtiss, her milk complexion and loose auburn curls were more Anglo than Disney’s Pocahontas, but questioning her blood quantum never crossed my mind. How could it? Being of color, I’d long resigned myself to what most American minorities from families spanning the skin color spectrum know: If one of the three race-defining elements (skin color, features, hair texture) is off stereotype, “Are you sure?” or “What else are you?” looms over every discussion with the uninitiated. But, Curtiss and I were initiated.

We met on a February morning as if we were sorority sisters from distant chapters executing an exclusive greeting in the form of her sigh that said, Thank God I don’t have to explain myself to you. It was unexpected, but I was grateful. We discussed her advocacy in the fight against the epidemic of missing, murdered, and trafficked Indigenous women plaguing North America; the crisis that led her to divulge, “I do not go a month without someone I have a personal connection to passing away.” More specifically, she spoke of her prominent role combating trafficking on Lake Superior ships that pass through Minnesota’s Duluth Port—the reason for my sojourn to the frigid Midwest.

On a 17-degree day with sharp winds blistering her hands and cheeks, Curtiss stood beside the great lake that keeps sweeping away her stolen sisters. She detailed injustices against many Native women who live unrecognized lives, invisible to all but those who mean them harm—demeaning, brutal harm—and introduced me to invisibility as a handicap, rather than a privilege of gods. Read more…

A Shot in the Arm

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Josh Roiland | Longreads | February 2017 | 14 minutes (3,710 words)

 

“Who’s sticking today?” the man asked.

He wore tan work boots and rough jeans. He told a friend in the waiting room that he had a couple hours off work and thought he’d stop in for some extra cash. The receptionist told him the names of that day’s phlebotomists. He paused. Sliding a 16-gauge needle into someone’s arm is tricky, and the man reconsidered. Instead of signing in, he announced to the room that he’d come back tomorrow and try his luck.

I’d driven 107 miles from my home in Bangor, Maine to the BPL Plasma Center in Lewiston to collect $50 for having my arm punctured and a liter of my plasma sucked out. The actual donation takes about 35 minutes, but the drive and its attendant wait makes for an eight-hour day. I clocked in for that trip five times this summer.

I’m a professor at the University of Maine. My salary is $52,000, and I am a year away from tenure. But like everyone else in that room, I was desperate for money. Read more…

Making Sense of Our Compulsions

Photo credit: Kayana Szymczak

Jessica Gross | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (3,932 words)

 

Checking our smartphones every few minutes. Making sure every spice jar is in the exact right place in the rack. Shopping. Stealing. Working nonstop. Hoarding. “Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning, and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief,” Sharon Begley writes in her new book, Can’t Just Stop. “Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.”

In a time of extreme anxiety for many of us, Begley’s book feels particularly relevant. In chapters that run the gamut from obsessive-compulsive disorder to compulsive do-gooding, Begley—a senior science writer for STAT, whose previous books include The Emotional Life of Your Brain and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brainexplores how behaviors that range widely in both character and extremity can come from a common root. “Venturing inside the heads and the worlds of people who behave compulsively not only shatters the smug superiority many of us feel when confronted with others’ extreme behavior,” she writes. “It also reveals elements of our shared humanity.” Begley and I spoke by phone about what anxiety is, exactly; her own compulsions; and whether it’s possible to have no compulsions (not likely).

What is the definition of “compulsion,” as compared to addiction and impulsive behaviors?

This was the first thing that I had to grapple with. The first thing I did was go around to psychologists and psychiatrists and start asking, “What is the difference between these three things?” To make a long story as short as possible, they really didn’t have a clue, or at least they were not very good at explaining it—to the extent that the same disorder would be described in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association, using “compulsive” one time and “impulsive” the next.

So where I finally came down, after finding people who had really thought about this, is as follows. Impulsive behaviors are ones that go from some unconscious part of your brain right to a motor action. There is very little emotion except for that feeling of impulsivity. There’s certainly little to no thought involved.

Behavioral addictions—and this is where I thought it started to get interesting—are born in something pleasurable. If you’re addicted to gambling, it probably is because, at least when you started, it was a whole lot of fun. You loved it. You got a hedonic hit, a pulse of enjoyment. And certainly as things go along, a behavioral addiction like gambling can cause you all sorts of distress and destroy your life. But at least at the beginning, it brings you extreme pleasure.

Compulsions are very different. They come from this desperate, desperate need to alleviate anxiety. They’re an outlet valve. The anxiety makes you want to jump out of your skin, or it makes you feel like your skin is crawling with fire ants. And what compulsions do is bring relief only after you have executed the compulsion, whether it is to exercise, or to check your texts, or to shop, or to keep something if you’re a hoarder. And crucially, compulsions, although they bring relief, bring almost no enjoyment except in the sense that if you stop banging your head against a wall, then it feels good to stop. Read more…

Swan, Late

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | February 2017 | 23 minutes (5873 words)

 

“Perfect is boring.”
— George Balanchine

I discovered I couldn’t dance when I was ten years old. My parents had signed me up for a ballet course in Toronto with a dour, shriveled Romanian teacher, chosen no doubt because of our shared totalitarian traumas. In her class I felt uncoordinated, impossibly gawky. My clearest memory is of trying to accomplish a gentle downward sweep of the hand. My teacher performed the movement. As I attempted to imitate her, she said, over and over, “but do it gracefully!” I could not figure out how to do it gracefully. I could not even see the difference between her gesture and mine. I came to the logical conclusion: I was terminally ungraceful. In fact, I couldn’t dance at all.

I quit ballet. I did have to dance again when I took part in the yearly audition held by a local school for the arts. I was terrible at acting and drawing too, but the dance test was my Waterloo. A teacher demonstrated a complicated choreography at the front of the room while we waited patiently in rows. Then he gave us a cue, and as if by magic, all of the other children repeated the combination perfectly. I, on the other hand, was a mess of arms and legs and confused desperation. I managed with twisted precision to be always facing in the opposite direction from the other kids, stumbling into them dangerously.

My inability to dance became a matter of faith, something I believed in unquestioningly for the next two decades. But I did so with pride and stubbornness. Everything about ballet felt wrong to me: all that Pepto-Bismol pink, ribbons and tulle, polished princesses executing their steps in martial unison, tight little buns behind tight little faces. Ballet represented hard beauty, ungenerous towards human flaws or quirks. It was a tyranny of perfection.

Read more…

Xenu’s Paradox: The Fiction of L. Ron Hubbard and the Making of Scientology

Illustration by Pat Barrett

Alec Nevala-Lee | Longreads | February 2017 | 28 minutes (7,744 words)

 

I.

L. Ron Hubbard published over four million words of fiction in his lifetime, but his most famous story consists of just a few handwritten pages. Before their contents were leaked in the early ’70s, they could be viewed at the Advanced Organization Building of the Church of Scientology, a hulking blue edifice off Sunset Boulevard where visitors were handed a manila envelope to open in a private room. Most had paid thousands of dollars for the privilege, which made it by far the most lucrative story Hubbard, or perhaps anyone, ever wrote—a spectacular rate for a writer who spent much of his career earning a penny per word.

The story itself, which has become more familiar than Hubbard or any of his disciples ever intended, revolves around the figure of Xenu, the tyrannical dictator of the Galactic Confederation. Millions of years ago, Xenu, faced with an overpopulation crisis, threw hordes of his own people into volcanoes on the planet Earth—then known as Teegeeack—and blew them up with atomic bombs. Their spirits, called thetans, survive to the present day, clinging to unsuspecting humans, and they can only be removed through dianetic auditing, a form of talk therapy that clears the subject of its unwanted passengers.

One of the church members who read this account was screenwriter and director Paul Haggis, who was a devoted Scientologist for over three decades before resigning in an ugly public split. Haggis told Lawrence Wright, the author of the seminal New Yorker piece that became the exposé Going Clear, that after finishing the story, he got the wild idea that it was some sort of insanity test—if you believed it, you were kicked out. When he asked his supervisor for clarification, he was informed: “It is what it is.” Haggis read it again, but the same thought continued to resound in his brain: “This is madness.” Read more…