Search Results for: Guardian

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…

Your Healing Crystals Are Part of the Capitalist Exploitation Machine

AP Photo/Eraldo Peres

In another example of the first world sucking the life from the third world, the booming demand for so-called healing crystals is ravaging Madagascar’s landscape and putting its citizens —  thousands of whom are children — at risk in unregulated mines. Crystal healing is a lucrative industry. Some stones have sold for millions of dollars apiece. But there’s nothing lucrative about it for the Malagasy people who mine them. As usual, this multibillion dollar industry is built on the cheap, expendable labor of many poor villagers, and the consumers who buy healing crystals seem more concerned with finding them at low prices than with child labor. As journalist Tess McClure points out in her in-depth investigation for The Guardian, crystals’ popularity, and their frequent appearance in the media, has not created much transparency in the supply chain. McClure does our dirty work for us: She follows the trail from shops and American mineral shows back to dangerous, dusty holes in the ground. McClure is an intrepid reporter with a nose for off-beat stories involving social justice and environmental issues. She starts this one at the rose quartz quarries near the villages of Anjoma Ramartina.

At other times, this crater would have been busy with the sound of men at work – his sons and nephews, who would come to dig and then split the cost of stone they sold – but today it was silent except for Rakotondrasolo’s careful footsteps. They had stopped work: rains had been heavy, and they worried that the water made the cavern less stable. “I was afraid, and was afraid for my children because of this soil. It can collapse on them. I asked them to stop working here,” Rakotondrasolo said.

He threw in a handful of gravel and it tumbled to the bottom. Of his 10 children, seven worked with him in the mine. The boys started at the age of about 14. When they find a thick seam of quartz they smash it out of the rock, then chain the pieces together. Some blocks are small, but others are 100kg or even 200kg. The miners drag the boulders out of the hole, sometimes five people hauling together, up on to the grass embankment and toward the hill where lorries come to load them.

I asked where the crystals went from there. “To the ports,” Rakotondrasolo shrugged. He did not know. Somewhere overseas. A long time ago a client brought him a rose orb, cut and polished into a sphere, to show him what eventually became of some of the stones he had mined. But the buyers mostly say little about what the crystals are used for or where they end up. They pay him and leave – about 800 ariary, or 23¢ a kilo, he said – 17¢ for lower quality. It is not much when the money is split between the men at work: 800 ariary buys a cup of rice at the village market.

As Rakotondrasolo stepped away from the crater, a low hiss sounded behind him. We turned back to see a thin layer of red gravel, loosened from the wall, slide down into the hole.

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Grandiose and Claustrophobic: ‘Prozac Nation’ Turns 25

Riverhead Books

Anne Thériault | Longreads | September 2019 | 6 minutes (1,607 words)

 

When I was 20, I cornered my ex-boyfriend in his bedroom during a party and cried on him for two hours, leaving a watery mascara stain down the front of his shirt. When he finally managed to extricate himself, I found his best friend and did the same to him. I made the rounds of the party, rehashing my misery to anyone who would listen: how my ex had broken my heart, how I was certain that I was an unloveable failure, how I thought about killing myself. I knew that I should stop and go home, but I couldn’t; my feelings were huge and immediate; the thought of being alone was unbearable.

I’d always been an over-emotional cryer, but that year was a personal nadir when it came to mental health. There had been the breakup, then I’d lost my housing situation, and finally, financial problems had forced me to drop out of school. I went from being an occasional downer to a wailing banshee party-ruiner. I just couldn’t differentiate between the immediate relief of dissolving into tears and the long-term gratification of cultivating emotional continence — probably because I no longer believed I had a future. My friends were exasperated and wanted to know why I couldn’t just stop doing things that made me feel bad. My answer — everything made me feel bad anyway, and I just couldn’t help it — seemed insufficient even to me.

A few weeks after the party crying incident, I found a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation at a secondhand bookstore. It had been out for nearly a decade, but up until then I’d resisted it. For one thing, I’d actually been on Prozac for the previous three years, so reading it seemed a little too clichéd. For another, I was skeptical that the beautiful girl on the cover, with her clear skin and artfully messy hair, could know anything about my ugly life. But by the end of the prologue — titled, with extreme subtlety and nuance, “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die” — I was hooked.

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves.

Prozac Nation is a young person’s book, both in terms of its author and its target audience. It’s full of florid language, sweeping generalizations, and an obsessive, unproductive introspection. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from someone like Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, or Edith Wharton. Many of the original reviews were negative, and offered valid critical perspectives on the book. The text did need a stronger editorial grip, at the very least to fix the distracting moments when Wurtzel jumps from one tense to another within the same paragraph. The narrative really was just as repetitive and self-pitying as critics accused it of being. Wurtzel seemed to have no perspective when it came to her own behavior, offering it all up for consumption without any kind of analysis. But all of this (tense-jumping aside) might be the book’s secret genius.

Prozac Nation was the first time I saw myself reflected in writing about mental illness. Sure, I’d read and loved Plath, Kaysen, and all the other stars of the depressed-lady canon, but none of their work was as relatable to me then as Wurtzel’s prose, at once grandiose and claustrophobic. It’s the kind of book that feels like edgy literature to a white girl in her early 20s, and I don’t mean that as snidely as it might sound; everyone deserves their own version of On The Road or Naked Lunch for that period in their life. Prozac Nation read to my 20-year-old self like something I aspired to someday write, precious epigraphs and all. At one point early in the narrative, Wurtzel voices a worry that her story is “too stupid, too girlish, too middle class.” But that was exactly why it resonated with me. Even the parts that grated on my nerves, like Wurtzel’s frequent bewailing of the fact that she had once been the best little girl in the world, sounded like me. In fact, I had a litany of similar regrets that I dragged out whenever I was down; I called it my catechism, which I thought was witty and ironic. There are certainly times when Prozac Nation feels monotonous and solipsistic, but that aligns with my own experiences with depressive spirals. Repetition and self-obsession are part of the nature of the illness.

Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort.

What seemed most important to me about Wurtzel’s writing was that she had been messy, and she was willing to detail that mess without apology. Just: here is how I’ve behaved. She offers the reader no contextualizing, no explaining, no objective distance from the events described. I still can’t tell if Wurtzel did this intentionally or not — and, if it’s a device meant to draw readers deep into her own stream of consciousness, she doesn’t always wield it skilfully — but either way, it was a radical departure from how I’d seen women write about themselves. I’d never read a story about a woman engaging in such rambunctious self-destruction that didn’t turn into a morality tale; on the other hand, there was no shortage of stories about men being comparably messy. This isn’t meant to be a bad faith argument about how “equality” means women deserve to behave just as badly as men, but rather that youthful messiness is a reality for people of all genders. There is power in seeing yourself represented, warts and all. How do you survive something if you don’t know that someone else has already survived it, too?

Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves. It laid the groundwork for the what Jia Tolentino called the “personal-essay boom” of the early 2010s, an era when no detail was too graphic, no humiliation too private for sharing. Wurtzel was oversharing before oversharing even became an everyday term we use, writing in a way that made people recoil with discomfort. But, like so many of those XOJane-style pieces, she also made people feel seen. Wurtzel’s writing has influenced how I write about mental illness; it’s made me more committed to relate my experiences in honest ways, rather than style them to appear more understandable or sympathetic. Through her, I’ve learned that it’s much more interesting when I center myself in my own narrative rather than the feelings my readers might have about it. The embarrassing personal details are, somehow, what makes these stories relatable. I’m sure there are many others whose writing owes a similar debt of gratitude to Wurtzel, even if they don’t realize it.


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Prozac Nation was published on September 25, 1994, three days after Friends premiered on NBC. Both are emblematic of that era: angsty Gen-X youth and the golden age of television sitcoms. Like many cultural artifacts that are very rooted in their particular time and place, neither has aged very well. Wurtzel’s semi-premise — that the use of SSRIs was too widespread, that America had become a nation of pill-poppers who were drawn to Prozac because of its name-brand trendiness — seems especially unsturdy. For one thing, she doesn’t even encounter the drug until the very end of the book, and when she does take it, she experiences a swift and nearly miraculous recovery. For another, all of the panic about SSRI consumption seems, in retrospect, almost adorable in its unfoundedness. Doctors were pushing the idea that oxycontin was non-habit-forming in any amount, but people were worried about Prozac?

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity.

Many of those concerns piggybacked on the very real problems with mid-century tranquilizer use, but they were also influenced by what psychiatrist Gerald L. Klerman termed pharmacological Calvinism: the idea that a drug that alleviates unhappiness is morally questionable. It’s an attitude that’s still very much present today, even though the use of SSRIs has become more normalized over the past 25 years. Pharmacological Calvinism is what makes your high school friend share those memes describing nature as the real antidepressant. It’s what leads people to view medication that treats anxiety and depression as a “crutch” rather than an ongoing and necessary treatment (which is a weird framing in and of itself, considering that people rarely use crutches unless they really need them). It’s the reason we hear arguments like the one in David Lazarus’ recent Los Angeles Times essay, where he describes himself as a “drug addict” because quitting antidepressants caused him to experience symptoms of depression, and quotes doctors praising the “work” of not taking medication as compared to the “easy” out of taking a pill every day. Of course, some people do experience adverse reactions while discontinuing use of SSRIs, but history has largely proven them to be quite safe compared to many other medications that experience similar faddish moments.

Re-reading Prozac Nation again after all these years felt a bit like being a 20-year-old melting down at a party: embarrassing, but somehow comforting in its familiarity. It made me feel grateful, above all else, for no longer being young. It’s such a relief to get older and be less vulnerable to Big Emotions, to have better coping skills, and to know how to opt out of drama. But I’m also grateful to my younger self for being deep in that depressive morass and still managing to navigate us to where we are now. I don’t hate her for who she was, as much as she sometimes failed to measure up to who I wanted to be. I try to be tender to her and understand that she was doing the messy best she could. Hopefully Wurtzel feels the same way.

* * *

Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based writer whose bylines can be found all over the internet, including at the Guardian, The London Review of Books and Longreads, where she created the Queens of Infamy series.

* * *

Editor: Ben Huberman

Remembering Daniel Johnston

Daniel Johnston at the Austin Music Awards, March 16, 2005. Randall Michelson/WireImage

Singer and songwriter Daniel Johnston was found dead at his home on the morning of September 11. He was 58. He sang about good and evil, sex, and true love. He courted and obtained a large, loyal cult following, as well as the respect of his musical peers. Johnston was an outsider artist, visually and musically. Diagnosed variously with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, he stood on the outside of mainstream expression looking in, and this exclusion granted him insight. “Everything you cling to will rot,” he sings on “Big Business Monkey,” “and everything you do will be forgot.”

Daniel Johnston embodied contradiction. His songs had an innocence that belied years of assiduous craftsmanship. His lyrics floated out in childlike rhymes, but addressed adult themes of love and loss and mental illness. He was considered pure — to the extent that he could not be corrupted by outside influences — but there was a patronizing quality to such considerations, allowing for  destructiveness as much as gentleness. As ambitious as he was incapable of handling recognition, Johnston constructed his legend by dismantling his career. 

“Quite often, Daniel was a pain in the ass,” friend and Austin Chronicle editor and cofounder Louis Black wrote in 2005. “Manipulative and innocence, Dr. Jekyll & Casper the Friendly Ghost, he looked like a near-child, sounded like an innocent, seemed a little slow, but a part of him always judged the odds around him better than any Vegas veteran.”

Born in Sacramento in 1961, Johnston was raised in West Virginia. His family was deeply religious. He learned to write songs in his parents’ basement by studying a book of Beatles music. Struck by a quote by Ringo Starr in which he claimed that the Beatles rewrote other people’s songs for their own purposes, Johnston did the same thing: He took his heroes’ songs apart and reassembled them in a different shape. 


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Johnston’s first record, Songs of Pain, was recorded on cassette. In between songs his mother can be heard saying things like, “You’ll never amount to anything!” His next album was titled Don’t Be Scared. 

After a brief attempt at college, Johnston followed his brother to Texas, winding up in Austin after stints in Houston and San Marcos. He made more albums, recording his shaky voice and chord organ on a boombox in his brother’s garage, and he gave the cassettes away to anyone who would listen. Initially unable to duplicate the tapes, he simply recorded a new version of an album every time someone asked for a copy.  

“Imagine what it was like,” Black wrote about first hearing Johnston around 1985. “Everything you know is wrong. Music reinvents itself in the middle of your ears. You sit there, not stunned but not normal. You play the tape again.”

One of Johnston’s cassettes made its way to Austin musician Brian Beattie, who, like other local songwriters, found the music strangely compelling. “I guess everyone who’s heard it for the first time, you’re kind of like trying to confront or understand that nervous feeling you get, that voyeuristic feeling from listening to how intimate [it is],” Beattie told the Austin Chronicle in 1999. Local bands, including the Butthole Surfers, began covering Johnston’s material.

Mark Kramer, founder of New York indie label Shimmy Disc, recorded Johnston in 1989. At first enjoying the experience, Johnston became increasingly agitated, singing about graveyards and the devil. He was unable to complete the album, so some live tracks were included to round it out. Supposed to be called 1989, the production took so long that the album was released as 1990. This record contains what is arguably Johnston’s most famous song, the plaintive “True Love Will Find You In The End.”  

“This is a promise with a catch,” Johnston sings. “Only if you’re looking can it find you.”

’Cause true love is searching too

But how can it recognize you

Unless you step out into the light the light

Don’t be sad, I know you will

But don’t give up until

True love will find you in the end

Johnston’s mental illness sometimes manifested itself quite publicly. The stories of his breakdowns — often brought about by positive reviews — are legion. By the early 1990s, Johnston had self-released several crudely recorded albums, appeared on MTV’s The Cutting Edge, attacked his manager with a pipe, suffered a psychotic break as a result of taking LSD at a concert, pulled the key out of the ignition of his father’s plane mid-flight, chased a terrified woman out of a window because he thought she had the devil in her, spent months in various mental institutions, and gained masses of fans for his vulnerable, awkward, undeniably catchy, and disarmingly direct songs. 

When Kurt Cobain wore a Johnston T-shirt during a string of photo shoots, things really took off. Cobain had been given the shirt, featuring the enigmatic Johnston-drawn cover of his Hi, How Are You album, and wore it during a performance at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards and numerous photo sessions at the height of Nirvana’s fame. Cobain also included Johnston’s Yip/Jump Music on lists as one of his favorite albums. 

 

This led to an almost instantaneous major label bidding war on Johnston: Elektra offered him a carte-blanche deal, but Johnson rejected the label as satanic. (Metallica was on their roster.) He fired his long-suffering manager and signed with Atlantic while residing in a state psychiatric hospital.

Fun, perhaps the most polished of Johnston’s work, was released in 1994. It stands alongside Skip Spence’s Oar and The Madcap Laughs by Syd Barrett as a brilliant, disjointed communication from a stricken and singular voice.  

Johnston was quickly disillusioned by major label patronage. “I had $35,000,” he remembered. “I was going, ‘Yeah! I’m rich!’ The next day they came out, made a video, and a couple of weeks later I get a $30,000 bill. Isn’t that a ripoff?” Fun sank without a trace. Atlantic dropped Johnston in 1996.  

The 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston further lionized the tormented artist. Listing Beck, Tom Waits, Wilco, and Pearl Jam among the luminaries who had covered his songs, the movie compared Johnston to the brilliant, struggling Beach Boy Brian Wilson, among others, and deftly portrayed him through animations of his drawings, new footage, and childhood home movies.

It’s always been troubling, at least to me, that Johnston’s turbulent life was consumed as avidly as his art. American culture has always been drawn to creators touched by fire; it confers a shamanistic quality, which helps explain the mysteries of artistic ability and inspiration. The side effect, of course, is that doing so puts that person at a safe remove, which is beneficial to those who love a so-called good train wreck or wish to profit unimpeded. But Daniel Johnston’s talent was his ability to communicate with unaffected emotional directness, which, when you listen to him, not only makes it harder to separate the artist from his art, but also from you yourself.

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Sam Schuyler

When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful

Illustration by Dola Sun

Dina Nayeri | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,210 words)

In the last two years I’ve become entangled in the workings of the homelessness prevention arm of London’s Camden Council. Camden is the borough that includes the British Museum, the British Library, a small sliver of Regents Park, and a huge chunk of Hampstead Heath. It also has its rough parts, with subsidized or free council housing, artists on grants, young mothers on benefits — as in most of London, Camden’s residents are a varied lot and everyone, whatever their socioeconomic class, uses some kind of government service.

Minoo is an Iranian refugee with two bright children and a sick, immobile husband. In Iran, she was an experienced nurse, her husband an engineer and Christian convert. Her daughter is clever and witty, her sharp eye taking in every detail. Her son is a football star with a head for math. The four escaped religious persecution and possible death in Iran, spent months as asylum seekers having their story scrutinized for lies, then slept in a roach motel for a few more months before being recognized as both refugees and at risk for homelessness. Now, having been granted asylum, they share a tiny room in a Camden hostel and wait for permanent housing.

Minoo and I met two years ago, when her church contacted me to befriend a new refugee who was at risk of depression. She was my age, a mother, like me, and came from my hometown in Iran. We had fled for the same kind of apostasy, though I had been a child and she was in her 30s. We met for coffee. She was bedraggled but smiled for my sake. She insisted on buying my coffee. She had sad, kind eyes, with a drop of something, like a tear, lodged near one iris. To bridge the class divide, and to put her at ease, I made a clown of myself, and soon she opened up to me. “We can’t breathe,” she said. “My son is almost a teenager. My daughter is suffocating.”

The family’s Camden hostel room has a single bed that they share: sick husband, wife, pre-teen boy and girl. From the bed, you can touch the bathroom door and the kitchen table. Three large steps will put you at the opposite wall. Every day, they face potential homelessness, and yet, for two years, the Camden housing authority has run them in circles. It’s important to stress that the family’s status has already been decided. By the (conservative) government’s own estimation, they are at risk of homelessness, and given the husband’s condition, entitled to public housing that includes separate rooms for the boy and girl. And yet, accessing it has been humiliating, repetitive, and opaque. Recently it’s become vindictive, too.
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Shelved: Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty Images

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2019 | 12 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Sometime between the massive success of his first single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the extraordinary musical statement of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison walked into a New York studio and recorded thirty-one of his worst songs.

To be fair, he was terrible on purpose. What became known as Morrison’s “revenge” or Contractual Obligation album is perhaps the most distinguished of many record label f-yous. Comprised of over thirty songs supposedly recorded in an afternoon, with titles such as “The Big Royalty Check” and “Blow In Your Nose,” the work was, understandably, shelved. Apparently that was the point: Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with Bang Records and make a new home with Warner Brothers, and the Contractual Obligation songs were supposedly central to that transition. Morrison’s Bang Records contract stipulated quantity, not quality. The truth, about all of it, is a lot more interesting.

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The Reluctant Propagandist

Illustration by Saman Sarheng

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4149 words)

 

It’s 7 a.m. in Kabul. As usual, hundreds of thousands of cars are stuck in traffic jams around the city, where police checkpoints, Humvees, and blast walls congest the perilous streets. Taxi drivers in faded yellow Corollas roll up their windows and try to shoo off street children blowing heady incense — meant to ward off evil spirits — inside their cars. Policemen yell “boro, boro” (move) through the loudspeakers of their dark-green pickups. Fruit sellers calmly navigate the madness, pushing heavy carts laden with dark-red pomegranates, juicy grapes, and Pakistani mangoes while dust lingers in the air behind them.

Here, nothing is ever certain: Any minute, a bomb could go off, destroying families, livelihoods, and hopes.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Venus Williams. (Jordan Mansfield / Getty Images for LTA)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Weil, Neena Satija, Dan McDougall, Leslie Jamison, and Amos Barshad.

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The Little Book That Lost Its Author

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Amber Caron | Boulevard | Spring 2019 | 16 minutes (3,262 words)

 

In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story, “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” Adolph Knipe, the story’s protagonist, invents a computer that can provide the answer to a math problem in five seconds. His invention is a technical masterpiece, and his boss sends him on a weeklong vacation to celebrate his good work. Knipe, however, doesn’t travel and doesn’t even celebrate. Instead, he takes a bus back to his two-room apartment, pours himself a glass of whiskey, and sits down in front of his typewriter to reread the beginning of his most recent short story: “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs.” It’s not a promising beginning, and Knipe knows it. He feels defeated, nothing more than a failed writer, when he’s suddenly “struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!” His fate isn’t to write stories, he realizes, but to build a machine that can write stories for him. Read more…

Greenland’s Deepening Ecological Grief

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With glacial ice retreating and formerly reliable sea ice becoming more and more treacherous for winter hunting and social trips, the people of Greenland understand climate change first hand. As Dan McDougall reports for The Guardian, a study of 2% of Greenland’s population by the University of Copenhagen and the Kraks Fond Institute for Urban Economic Research reveals that Greenlanders are experiencing greater anxiety and a special sort of ecological grief as direct results of climate change eroding their traditional ways of life.

“There is no question Arctic people are now showing symptoms of anxiety, ‘ecological grief’ and even post-traumatic stress related to the effects of climate change. The impact of climate change on mental health is a looming public health crisis. So if a Greenland-wide survey points to anxieties around food security and way of life it’s another red line between climate change and mental health,” says Howard. “We are searching for terms to capture this deep feeling of pain in Arctic nations – words like eco-anxiety or ecological grief – but for me, something called ‘solastalgia’ perfectly sums up how people living on the frontline of climate change feel. It was coined by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It is also related to an Inuit word that refers to a friend behaving in an unfamiliar way. It means feeling homesick when you are home. Many of these islanders are in mourning for a disappearing way of life.”

In Ilulissat, Claus Rassmussen is stirring a foul brew of oily blood and fish. “Seal stew,” the sled-dog hunter says. Strung out in a row, his family carry buckets of the murky soup to feed to the dogs – a nightly ritual for Rassmussen and his five daughters.

Over the past two decades, Greenland’s sled dog population has halved to around 15,000 with the numbers still falling. Greenland’s unique sled dog culture and the specialised training technology and knowledge is in danger of disappearing.

An interview with Rassmussen proves more emotional than anticipated. In his modest home, an old wooden cottage among social housing blocks, his face is contorted. Instead of the Greenlandic way – long silences and monosyllabic answers – there comes an outpouring.

There are six of us crouched in the room, including three of his daughters, as he talks about the decision to kill his beloved dogs because he could no longer afford to feed them. As he talks about shooting one, a dog given the name “my son” in the local language, the teenagers burst into tears – a shocking explosion of grief in a culture where emotion is rarely shown. In Inuit culture, strength, silence, and self-sufficiency are admired traits.

“I had a blood clot last year and couldn’t hunt,” says Rassmussen. “Here in Ilulissat we have the ice fjord and, for now, it’s strong enough to hold us, but I was unable to walk for nine months. The trouble was nobody wanted my dogs so I had to kill eight of 13.

“I killed my favourites. To spare them possible cruelty. That was my decision. The others were given away to people I knew. They weren’t dog people, but were interested in having animals – but perhaps they weren’t looked after in the way they should’ve been. I managed to take some back and since then I have been building up a new dog team.”

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