Search Results for: Guardian

The Shopper’s Dream of an Optimized Life

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Shopping online can seem like the ultimate way to save time and trouble. This is especially true now that we have to stay indoors to reduce exposure to the Coronavirus. From Netflix to candle subscriptions to Rent the Runway, subscription-based businesses and direct to consumer services like Warby Parker take that promise further, allowing you to both avoid a brick and mortar store and even the thought of shopping at all. Subscriptions buy you time. Think of all the things you can do with your time once you have to shop less! At Esquire, editor Kelly Stout reveals the tragic flaw in that thinking. Although, theoretically, subscriptions free up customers’ time to do other things, no one can get us to spend that newly available time more efficiently. There is no optimizing for that.

The dream of the subscription is that without having to use our brains for something as mundane as remembering to buy razor cartridges, we might do something better with our time. We might even become more optimized human beings—an economic fever dream that dates back to, I don’t know, the invention of the cotton gin. Probably earlier. In a memorable essay for The Guardian, Jia Tolentino summarized the economist William Stanley Jevons’s definition of optimization: “We all want to get the most out of what we have.” Saving not just time but effort is key to forward momentum in the industrial phantasmagoria that is, at this moment, blasting circus music into my ears. It’s a flattering proposition that implies I’m capable of something grand. Once we’ve saved all that money, all that time, all that hassle, out pops a gameshow host—his smile wider than a Smile-DirectClub member’s—to ask us, What will you do with all this time?

One answer is work. With fewer hours, minutes, or even seconds spent chopping onions and herbs for tonight’s dinner, I could be turning that extra time into money. But I had a different idea: What if, instead, I enjoyed myself? In her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for leisure time—not leisure time as “side hustle” or “monetizable” or even something that will improve the self, but as recreation for no reason. This is a novel idea in 2020, even though it’s been around for more than a century. “As far back as 1886 . . . workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will,’ ” Odell writes. The movement inspired a poster of people in canoes and a song about feeling the sunshine and smelling the flowers. When I read that, I thought: Dang, I never canoe! Maybe shaving off a sliver of my time at CVS could add to those eight what-I-will hours. And yet I spent those extra seconds sitting on my couch. I wasn’t doing anything except scrolling through my feeds, thinking about my subscriptions, contemplating how I could optimize my life further. I wasn’t even going to the store.

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Grieving, but Calmed by a Different Kind of Storm

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Stephanie Land | Longreads | April 2020 | 12 minutes (3,059 words)

 
Almost a month into COVID isolation, I curled up on my bedroom floor under the window I’d opened to rid the room of my children’s lunch aromas — the ketchup and chicken nugget smells that relentlessly crawled up the stairs every day before noon. John Prine’s “Souvenirs” drifted out of my laptop’s speakers, drowning out the blaring screens full of TikToks and my youngest’s kindergarten Zoom meetings that were even more ridiculous to see in real time. On my own screen was the ever-faithful blank document, its cursor drumming, reminding me of my inability to produce, my failure to do my job that day. At least I showed up. Kind of.

I fingered the carpet inches from my face, watching the dog hairs vibrate as I breathed in and out. It was the hair of our newest dog, the husky. Everything in our bedroom seemed coated with a layer of it. Last fall, my husband and I drove nine hours down to Salt Lake City to adopt her on the same morning the pregnancy test came back positive. The twins would have been somewhere around 24 weeks by now. As big as eggplants. Imagine that.

***

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore. It happened in that moment between turning off the car and opening the door when the panic attack occurred. This was only a few days after we’d returned from our honeymoon. I was on my way home from the therapist’s office. I’d made a frantic appointment after I woke up to a message from an acquaintance that began, “Thought you might want to know” and continued with the information that my abusive ex was in town. This was the man who’d strangled me and kept me imprisoned in his anxiety for a year after that — yeah, that one. Someone saw him in town the night before at a bar. “He was with a girl,” the messenger said. “They looked pretty cozy.”

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore.

My panic attack wasn’t about that specifically, though in some way I guess it was. I’d ended the appointment with my therapist by admitting I was too embarrassed to go out in my small town because I’d gained 25 pounds in the past year. “I can’t look people in the eye,” I’d said, “because I just start telling myself what they must be thinking.” My ex’s snide attitude toward anything but his idea of a perfectly fit body was at the root of this. He had been my daily critic of what I wore, ate, and the progress I’d made, through exercise, to shrink my body to the smallest size possible. It was my ex’s words, but in other people’s imaginary voices.

For the six months before that, since people started referring to my first book as “critically acclaimed,” every time I saw myself on a television screen doing an interview with a morning show host, I saw my ex watching it just long enough to turn to the person next to him and say, with arms crossed, “Look at how fat she is.”


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For 15 minutes that August afternoon, I gasped for air with the windows still rolled up, hot tears falling on my bare thighs, before I felt safe enough to drive home. I’d offered to pick up a few things for dinner, and now I’d be forced to admit I hadn’t been able. That I’d had a panic attack in a grocery store parking lot because I couldn’t go inside alone, fearing I’d run into someone I knew, or didn’t know. A lot of people had approached me in that grocery store since my book came out. Some wanted to tell me their story, often with tears in their eyes, then ask, “Can I just give you a hug?” I felt pressured to say yes. Now I’d admitted out loud what I imagined them thinking, and that seemed to make it real.

After that, whenever I had to go somewhere in town, my husband always came with me. He was a good buffer for those situations — something to physically put between myself and the person who wanted to talk to me. Every person who made eye contact became a potential “fan” who’d ask for a hug, only now I saw it as a potential threat. An imaginary mockery of my appearance, an invasion of my private life, the one I kept close since the swarm of interviews started the year before.
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The Streaming Service of the Moment

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Disney launched its new service, Disney+, on March 24th, the same day as the lockdown began in the United Kingdom. As Sophie Elmhirst wryly notes in her piece for The Guardian, the launch falling upon the day that 66 million were told to stay at home for 23 hours a day, must have resulted in “a quiet elbow bump in a meeting room, perhaps.” Elmhirst herself was quick to sign up in the service as a source of her entertainment for her children. 

Maybe it didn’t feel like that for everyone. Maybe the parents who secretly love the home schooling vibe, the timetables and worksheets, the children sitting happily at kitchen tables, tongues sticking out of the side of their mouths as they complete little astronomy quizzes while the parent stirs a healthy stew, maybe they didn’t sign up for Disney+ a full week before it launched. For the rest of us, hurling fish fingers into the oven with one hand while trying to tap out a piece of work with the other and break up a fight with a toe, the relatively low cost of a Disney+ subscription (£5.99 a month) when contemplating the long, long, just so very long, period of time ahead of us, felt like a sensible investment.

Rewatching the old classics, Elmhirst soon realizes that she signed up for the service for herself just as much as for her children. In times of uncertainty, there is comfort in the familiar.

During that seventh Bolt viewing, I realized why the kids wanted to keep watching the same movie over and over again. There’s the expert appreciation for a fine piece of computer animation, no doubt, but there’s also the deep comfort to be found in repeat viewing. Even multiple screenings in, they both covered their eyes in terror during a chase scene. The fear was real, but it was that pleasurable kind of fear you know will pass. There’s no uncertainty, no risk. You know, for a fact, that everything will be OK. It’s fear with a happy ending.

Despite the current crisis Disney probably will indeed be OK. However, it’s current reality is very different from its normal fairytale image. 

Rightly, the company isn’t high on anyone’s worry list. But it’s striking how far the current reality of Disney is from its well-tended corporate image. In late March, various news outlets published pictures of Disney’s closed theme parks – empty car parks, rollercoasters, cafes, golf courses, and a lonely-looking Millennium Falcon at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. The photographs are somehow more sinister than those of empty cities that have been doing the rounds. Cities, at the best of times, are conflicted and messy, beautiful, and cruel. They rarely pretend to be anything they’re not, unless there’s an Olympics going on.

Disney, on the other hand, is always pretending to be something it’s not: it is a highly efficient profit machine that presents itself as a place where a merry band of misfits conjure happiness.

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How Margaret Atwood is Passing Time During the Pandemic

(Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic)

Without book signings, festivals, talks, and fundraisers to attend, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s got some time on her hands, as she notes at The Guardian. How is she passing time during lockdown? Why, thwarting squirrels, sewing face masks for health care workers, and conducting rubber chicken choirs. As one does.

Mary Beard, the two-fisted Cambridge classicist who understands crises, debacles and pandemics, being an authority on ancient Rome, asked me to do a remote item for the BBC Front Row Late show, which usually reviews theatre but now can’t because there isn’t any. “Just a little something,” she said, “as long as it’s on plagues.” This awakened the Kraken of my deep past – a childhood of reading horror literature, not only the Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook for proto-homemakers but also the collected work of Edgar Allan Poe. Who let that into the kiddie section of the library? Well, there isn’t any sex in it: that was probably the excuse; and children are so fond of decaying corpses, especially those with all their teeth pulled out, as in “Berenice”. So me and “The Masque of the Red Death” go way back.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Amanda Hess, Robert Draper, Emily Gogolak, Mark O’Connell, and Gabrielle Bellot.

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1. The Wing Is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There.

Amanda Hess | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2020 | 20 minutes (5,140 words)

Surprise: women’s empowerment harnessed to American-style capitalism delivers more inequality, and an Instagram wall can’t fix it.

2. The School Shooting That Austin Forgot

Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | March 19, 2020 | 41 minutes (10,305 words)

“The anguish that has plagued the Murchison students presages the kind of long-tail trauma that many of today’s witnesses to shootings will be burdened with for the rest of their lives.”

3. An Intersection at the End of America

Emily Gogolak | Oxford American | March 17, 2020 | 45 minutes (11,400 words)

“A portrait of Dilley, Texas, home of the largest immigration detention center in the United States.”

4. Real Estate for the Apocalypse: My Journey into a Survival Bunker

Mark O’Connell | The Guardian | March 17, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,844 words)

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, entrepreneurs are translating fears of societal collapse into post-apocalyptic gated communities.

5. The Curious Language of Grief

Gabrielle Bellot | Catapult | March 11, 2020 | 13 minutes (3,495 words)

“I wonder why I wonder, and then I remember why: I am still mourning him, in part because I am mourning all the relationships I never got to have with the people who never knew me as a woman.”

What Does a Post-Apocalyptic Gated Community Look Like?

bunkers south dakota
Chris Huber / Rapid City Journal via AP

In trying times, many of us gravitate to escapist cultural consumption — think Seth Rogen watching Cats for the first time while very, very high. You’d assume that a story about mid-market post-apocalyptic bunkers in South Dakota would be the last thing to fit that bill, yet I somehow found Mark O’Connell’s excerpt on that very topic, in The Guardian, oddly soothing.

The piece takes great pleasure in describing the obvious folly of the enterprise — how could it not? (I kept wondering: all these communities would depend on contracted armed forces for protection, but what would stop these mercenaries from killing their wealthy overlords and taking over all the fancy dry foods in their underground pantries?) But it also shows how this absurd concept is, in fact, a very natural next step for a society that largely refuses to act as one.

The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America”, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres and 100 miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from three miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but, to be fair, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished, any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.

Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers and turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders — the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared — and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bare rightwing essentials: a militarised security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.

End-time real estate was an increasingly competitive racket. On the website of one major purveyor of luxury apocalypse solutions, Trident Lakes, I read that in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological emergency, the properties would be sealed by automatic airlocks and blast doors, and that each would be connected via a network of tunnels to an underground community centre featuring dry food storage, DNA vaults, fully equipped exercise rooms and meeting areas. The promotional blurb also promised such features as a retail district, an equestrian centre and polo field, an 18-hole golf course and a driving range.

This was a new entry into the canon of apocalyptic scenarios: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilisation as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeter in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.

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A Crying Public Shame

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2020 |  10 minutes (2,569 words)

“Can I talk to you in private?” No one wants to hear those words. The impulse is to assume you’ve done something egregiously wrong. The expectation is that you are about to be punished. The conviction is so strong that the only good thing about it is that, at least initially, you can suffer without anyone else knowing about it. You might even thank the punisher for coming to you directly, for keeping it between just the two of you. It’s the least someone can do when they are about to theoretically ruin your life.

A lot has been written about privacy online, in terms of information, in terms of being policed. Ecuador is currently rushing to pass a data protection law after a breach affected as many as 20 million people — more than the country’s population. A lot has also been written about callout and cancel culture, about people being targeted and cast off (if only temporarily), their entire history dredged up and subjected to ex post facto judgement; Caroline Flack, the British television presenter who recently committed suicide while being hounded in the press and online amid allegations she had assaulted her on-again, off-again boyfriend, was seen as its latest casualty. But there hasn’t been a lot of talk about the hazier in-between, about interpersonal privacy online, about missteps once dealt with confidentially by a friend or a colleague or a boss, about the discrete errors we make that teach equally discrete lessons so as not to be repeated in public. That’s not how it is anymore, not in a world tied together by social media. Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep. We’re all primed — and able — to admonish institutions and individuals: “Because of social media, marginalized people like myself can express ourselves in a way that was not possible before,” Sarah Hagi wrote in Time last year. “That means racist, sexist, and bigoted behavior or remarks don’t fly like they used to.” 

Which is to say that a lot of white people are fucking up, as usual, but now everyone, including white people and people of color, are publicly vilifying them for it as tech’s unicorn herders cash in on the eternal flames. And it’s even worse than in the scarlet letter days: the more attention the worse the punishment, and humiliation online has the capacity for infinite reach. As Sarah John tweeted after one particular incident that left a person hospitalized, “No one knows how to handle cancel culture versus accountability.”

* * *

“Is that blood?” That was my first question after a friend of mine sent me a message with a link to a few tweets by a person I’d never heard of, the editor-in-chief of a small site. The majority of the site’s staff had just resigned, the impetus being a semi-viral tweet, since deleted, of a DM the editor had sent a Twitter chat in 2016: “I was gonna reply to this with ‘n—a say what?’ Then I was like holy shite that’s racist, I can’t say that on twitter.” According to Robert Daniels at the Balder and Dash blog on rogerebert.com, tweeters, mostly white, piled on — some even called the EIC’s workplace demanding they be fired — before the office-wide resignation. Videos embedded in the tweets I saw showed the editor crying through an apology. (Longreads contacted the editor for comment; they’ve asked to remain anonymous for their health and safety.)

Initially I thought the videos were just a mea culpa, but then I saw a flash of red. Though the details are muddied by a scrubbed social media history, the editor appeared to have harmed themselves. Ex-colleagues rushed to their aid, however, and they were eventually hospitalized. If that wasn’t horrible enough, a filmmaker named Jason Lei Howden decided to avenge the EIC. With scant information, apparently, he targeted individuals on Twitter who weren’t involved in the initial pile-on, specifically blaming two people of color for the crisis — Valerie Complex and Dark Sky Lady, who had not in fact bullied anyone but had blogged about Howden. The official Twitter account of Howden’s new film, Guns Akimbo, got mixed up in the targeted attacks, threatening the release of the film.

There are multiple levels to this that I don’t understand. First, why that DM was released; why didn’t the person simply confront the EIC directly? Second, why did the editor’s staff, people who knew them personally, each issue individual public statements about their resignations into an already-growing pile-on? (I don’t so much wonder about the pile-on itself because I know about the online disinhibition effect, about how the less you know a person online, the more you are willing to destroy them.) Third, why the hell did that filmmaker get involved, and without any information? Why did the white man with all the clout attack a nebulous entity he called “woke twitter” — presumably code for “people of color” — and point a finger at specific individuals while also denying their response to one of the most inflammatory words in the English language (didn’t they realize it was an “ironic joke,” he scoffed)? As Daniels wrote, “This became a cycle of blindspots, and a constant blockage of discussing race, suicide, and alliance.” Why, at no point, did anyone stop to think about the actual people involved, about maybe taking this private, to a place where everything wasn’t telegraphed and distorted? 

Paper trails aren’t just emails anymore; they take in any move you make online, most notably on social media, and the entire internet is your peevish HR rep.

I had the same question after the BFI/Thirst Aid Kit controversy. In mid-February, the British Film Institute officially announced the monthlong film series THIRST: Female Desire on Screen, curated by film critic Christina Newland and timed to coincide with the release of her first book, She Found It at the Movies (full disclosure: I was asked to participate, but my pitch was not accepted). The promotional image included an illustration of a woman biting her lip, artwork similar to that of three-year-old podcast Thirst Aid Kit (TAK), a show that covers the intersection of pop culture and thirst. Newland later told The Guardian she wondered about the “optics,” but as a freelancer with no say on the final design, she deferred to the BFI. She had in fact twice approached TAK cohost Nichole Perkins to contribute to her book (the podcast’s other cohost is Bim Adewunmi). Perkins told me in an email that she wanted to, but her work load eventually prevented her. And while TAK did share the book’s preorder link, the BFI ultimately failed to include the podcasters in the film series as speakers, or even just as shout-outs in the publicity notes — doubly odd, given that Adewunmi is London-based. Quote-tweeting the BFI’s announcement and tagging both the institute and Newland, TAK responded, “Wow! This sounds great. Hope our invitation arrives soon!”

The predictable result was a Newland pile-on in which she was accused of erasing black women’s work, followed by a TAK pile-on — though Perkins told me her personal account was “full of support and kindness” — for claiming ownership over a term that preceded them. All three women ended up taking time away from Twitter (which is a sacrifice for journalists whose audience depends on social media) though Newland has since returned. I asked Perkins if she had thought about dealing with the situation privately at first. “I did consider reaching out to Christina before quote-tweeting, yes,” she wrote. “I wonder if she considered reaching out to us, especially after she saw the artwork for the season and admittedly noticed ‘something going on with the optics,’ as she is quoted as saying in The Guardian.” Eventually, the BFI contacted Perkins and Adewunmi and released a statement apologizing “for their erasure from the conversation we are hoping to create from this season” and announcing a change of imagery. They also noted that Newland, as a guest programmer, was not responsible for their marketing mistake, though no reason was given for their omission. “I have no idea why the BFI or Ms Newland didn’t include Thirst Aid Kit in the literature about the Thirst season,” Adewunmi wrote to me. “I was glad, however, to see the institution acknowledge that initial erasure, as well as issue an apology, in their released statement.”

At around the same time, a similar situation was unravelling in the food industry. Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices, an anthology edited by former Food Network VP Katherine Alford and NPR’s Kathy Gunst, was published in early February. The collection of more than 50 recipes and essays presents baking as “a way to defend, resist, and protest” and was supposedly inspired by the 2016 election. The hashtag #ragebaking was used to promote the book on social media in January, which brought it to the attention of a woman named Tangerine Jones, whose Instagram followers believed the idea had been stolen from her and alerted her — and the rest of the world. Unprompted by Jones, Alford and Gunst DM’d her to say they had learned the term elsewhere and that the book was “a celebration of this movement.” Jones called them out publicly, publishing their DMs in a Medium essay entitled “The Privilege of Rage,” in which she described how she came up with the concept of rage baking — using the #ragebaking hashtag and the ragebaking.com URL — five years ago, as an outlet for racial injustice. “In my kitchen, I was reminded that I wasn’t powerless in the face of f**kery,” she wrote. Jones’s supporters started a pile-on, her article shared by big names like Rebecca Traister, who had contributed to the collection and requested that her contribution be removed from future editions. 

In an abrupt turn of events, the Jones advocates were promptly confronted with advocates of the book, who redirected the pile-on back at Jones for kicking up a fuss. “It is beyond f**ked up that my questioning the authors’ intentions and actions is being framed as detrimental to the success of other black women,” she tweeted. Their silence resounding, the Simon and Schuster imprint ultimately issued a statement that failed to acknowledge their mistake and instead proposed “in the spirit of communal activism” to include Jones in subsequent printings. Unappeased, the baker called out the “apology” she received privately from Alford and Gunst, who told her they were donating a portion of the proceeds to the causes she included in her post (though their public apology didn’t mention that), and asked if she would be interviewed as part of the reprint. “Throwing black women under the bus is part of White Feminist legacy,” Jones tweeted. “That is not the legacy I stand in, nor will I step in that trap.”


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According to Lisa Nakamura, a University of Michigan professor who studies digital media, race, and intersectionality, cancel culture comes from trying to wrest control in a context in which there is little. It’s almost become a running joke the way Twitter protects right-wing zealots while everyone else gets pummeled by them. It follows then that marginalized populations, the worst hit, would attempt to use the platform to reclaim the power they have so often been denied. But as much as social media may sometimes seem like the only place to claim accountability, it is also the worst place to do it. In a Medium post following their Howden hounding, Dark Sky Lady argued that calling out is not bullying, which is true — but the effects on Twitter are often the same. “The goal of bullying is to destroy,” they wrote. “The goal of calling out and criticizing is to improve.” Online, there appears to be no improvement without destruction in every direction, including the destruction of those seeking change. On one end, a group of white people — the EIC, Newland, Alford, Gunst — was destroyed professionally for erring; on the other were the POC — Perkins, Adewunmi, Jones — who were personally destroyed, whose pain was minimized, whose sympathy was expected when they got none. The anger was undoubtedly justified. Less justified was the lack of responsibility for how it was deployed — publicly, disproportionately, with countless people’s hurt revisited on specific individuals, all at once. 

We know how pile-ons work now; it’s no defense to claim good intentions (or lack of bad intentions). There were few gains for either side in any of these cases, with the biggest going to the social media machine that feeds on public shame and provides no solution, gorging on the pain of everyone involved without actually providing constructive way forward, creating an ever-renewing cycle of suffering. A former intern for the ousted EIC tweeted that she understood the impulse to critique cancel culture and support the editor, but noted that “there is something sad about the fact that my boss used a racial slur, and I am not allowed to criticize.”

* * *

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed author Jon Ronson told Maclean’s in 2015 that one of his biggest fears is being defined by one mistake, and that a number of journalists had basically told him, “I live in terror.” I am no exception. Just recently I experienced a comparatively tame callout on Twitter, and even that moderate critique made me drop an entire book project, wonder about a job opportunity that subsequently dissolved, and second-guess every story idea I’ve had since. The situation was somewhat helpful in making me a more considerate person but was exponentially more helpful in making me anxious and in inspiring hateful fantasies about people I had never met. I am 100 percent certain that the first gain would have been made just as successfully had people spoken to me privately and would have saved me from the second part becoming so extreme that I had to leave social media to recalibrate. The overwhelming sense I’m left with is that if I say something that someone doesn’t like, even something justifiable, my detractors will counter with disproportionate force to make whatever point it is they want to make about an issue that’s larger than just me. What kind of discourse is that which mutes from the start, which turns every disagreement into a fight to the death, which provides no opportunity for anyone to learn from their failures? How do we progress with no space to do it?

“I think we need to remember democracy. When somebody transgresses in a democracy, other people give them their points of view, they tell them what they’ve done wrong, there’s a debate, people listen to each other. That’s how democracy should be,” Ronson told Vox five years ago. “Whereas, on social media, it’s not a democracy. Everybody’s agreeing with each other and approving each other, and then, if somebody transgresses, we disproportionately punish them. We tear them apart, and we don’t want to listen to them.” The payment for us is huge — almost as big as the payout for the tech bros who feign impartiality when their priority is clearly capital and nothing else. This is a punitive environment in which we are treating one another like dogs, shoving each other’s noses into the messes we have made. Offline, people are not defined by the errors they make, but by the changes they make when they are confronted with those errors, a kind of long game that contradicts the very definition of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. The irony of public shaming on social media is that social media itself is the only thing that deserves it.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

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This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online

John William Waterhouse, A Tale from the Decameron, 1916. (Wikimedia Commons)

“The pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry and oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them…” —Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

“At the beginning of the plague, when there was now no more hope but that the whole city would be visited;…you may be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

 

Dear Reader,

When the pandemic comes, the usual thing is for people to stop talking to one another. I’ve been consulting my small collection of plague books (a normal thing to own), and I’m getting the impression that this has always been the case. Talking and touching are, after all, biologically indistinguishable; to communicate, you have to get close to someone. Close enough to catch whatever it is they’ve got.

Or anyway that used to be how it went. It used to be that, when a plague came around, if you were worried you couldn’t live without other people and their stories and all their little habits and funny dances and things, you had better secure a few charming young noblewomen to take with you into seclusion at your country villa for the duration of the epidemic. Nowadays the script has been flipped. Clubbers can go to “cloud raves,” bored teens can post funny videos, and I can write and publish this month’s books newsletter from the comfort of my living room — I can communicate myself to thousands of you even though I haven’t left my house in like 90 hours, having been a little too spooked by the specter of “community spread” in New York to see First Cow at the Angelika this weekend even though I already had tickets.

(Not, to be honest, that I don’t always write the newsletter from my couch! But it’s a little different, obviously, working from home as opposed to actively avoiding other people.)

The coronavirus is “the first pandemic in history that could be controlled,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday. What he meant is that it’s the first pandemic for which we’ve had a whole host of technologies at our disposal that can allow society to screech to a grinding halt without totally collapsing — arguably the most important of which is the internet. Solitude without loneliness is, incredibly, achievable on a wide scale. We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud. No need to recruit the noblewomen. The Decameron is online.

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of nine not-to-be-missed book-related stories from all around the web this past month, communicated from me to you with zero physical contact. And, while reading, if you happen to get tempted to go out into a big crowd and breathe other people’s air and feel the heat from other people’s bodies, remember this important piece of advice: don’t.

 

1. “Sex in the Theater: Jeremy O. Harris and Samuel Delany in Conversation” by Toniann Fernandez, The Paris Review

A remarkable conversation on sex, art, and so much more between acclaimed playwright Jeremy O. Harris and sci-fi legend Samuel Delany, whom you may or may not know is also, in the vein of his childhood inspirations Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade, a writer of erotic novels, such as the “unpublishable” Hogg.

2. “A Dirty Secret: You Can Only Be a Writer If You Can Afford It” by Lynn Steger Strong, The Guardian

Novelist Lynn Steger Strong examines the damning economics of authorship.

3. “The Post-Traumatic Novel” by Lili Loofbourow, The New York Review of Books

“What I have found myself hungering for, in short, is literature that stretches past legal testimonies and sentimental appeals toward what, for lack of a better phrase, I’m calling post-traumatic futurity.” Lili Loofbourow reviews three recent books reflective of the Me Too moment and outlines a new approach to the survivor’s story.


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4. “Jericho Rising” by Allison Glock, Garden & Gun

A profile of the incredible Jericho Brown. “In person, Brown is an explosion of life, magnetic, boisterous, a one-man carnival ride. Simply put, there is no scenario where one would be unaware that Jericho Brown is in the room.”

5. “Fan Fiction Was Just as Sexual in the 1700s as It Is Today” by Shannon Chamberlain, The Atlantic

Get this: Henry Fielding made a smutty fanfic of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and he called it… Shamela.

6. “Killing the Joke: On Andrea Long Chu’s Females” by Elena Comay del Junco, The Point

Like pretty much everyone, I take perverse delight in a good takedown. There have been a lot of spicy takedown reviews already this year— Lauren Oyler on Jia Tolentino, Emily Gould on Meghan Daum, Jennifer Szalai on Katie Roiphe — and I suppose that, technically, this not-exactly-positive review of Andrea Long Chu’s Females could be seen as something like a takedown; but in the end Comay del Junco’s approach is so thoughtful that it just makes me more interested in the book. Sometimes disagreement is not discouragement.

7. “Behind the Green Baize Door” by Alison Light, The London Review of Books

A review of Feminism and the Servant Problem, a history of the political tension between the suffragettes and their maids: “Employers protested against interference in the relations between mistress and maid. Some believed that their servants had it easy — novel-reading was a particular irritant. One cautioned against leaving the suffrage paper lying around the house: it was too sexually explicit and political discussion might give servant girls the wrong idea.”

8. “Opportunity Costs: On Work, Idealism, and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley” by Eryn Loeb, Guernica

Eryn Loeb reflects on her own work history while reviewing Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir of selling out in Silicon Valley.

9. “The Beats, the Hungryalists, and the Call of the East” by Akanksha Singh, The Los Angeles Review of Books

Singh reviews Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury’s The Hungryalists, a book that explores the connection between Allen Ginsberg and the eponymous group of radical Bengali poets. “Their name is in reference to Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of hungry in in the sowre hungry tyme in his translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.”

 

Happy reading, and good luck! Stay inside if you can!

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky
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15 True Crime Longreads and the Questions We Should Ask Ourselves When Reading Them

(Armin Weigel/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

“I think one of the reasons these stories are so popular — and they’ve been very popular since long before whatever true crime boom we’re currently in,” Rachel Monroe notes while discussing her book Savage Appetites, on our cultural fascination with crime, is that “they’re very emotionally engaging.”

“Whenever we’re telling these stories,” Monroe continues, “we’re participating in that emotional, social, political conversation, whether we want to admit it or not.”

For all that we can stream entire seasons of docudramas in a single day, true crime stories often take years to report out and get right. Whether the person facing the facts of any given case is a staff writer or a law enforcement official, even full-time, invested professionals can lack the bandwidth or the resources to investigate every life story that crosses their desks, with the undivided attention each of those lives deserves.

Read more…