Search Results for: Harper's

The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad and Katie Kosma

Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…

It’s Never Too Late to Apologize

Hindudstan Times/Getty Images Justin Bieber asks, “Is it too late now to say sorry?” Longreads says, “Better late than never!”

Taking criticism is hard. Lately, it appears especially hard for writers who are also on Twitter, which is many — maybe even most — writers.

Earlier this week, New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss tweeted a video of American Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu landing a triple axel. Nagasu was the first American to ever achieve this at the Olympics — a huge feat. Weiss appended her tweet with a reference to Hamilton: “Immigrants: They get the job done.”

Twitter users were quick to point out that Nagasu is not an immigrant. Her parents are Japanese immigrants, but she was born in California and held dual citizenship until she was 22. (Also, the lyric in Miranda’s song is phrased “Immigrants: we get the job done.”) To the first correction, Weiss claimed she knew that fact, but she was taking “poetic license.” In a vacuum, Weiss’ tweet is a misstep, but not unforgivable. The desire to celebrate Nagasu is good, referencing Hamilton is good. But in the context of her work and public statements, the implicit assumption that someone non-white, with an “ethnic” name, was automatically an immigrant rubbed people the wrong way.

Rather than considering this point, Weiss lashed out. She claimed she deleted the tweet after “being told I am a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die.” A cursory look through her mentions showed no evidence supporting this claim, but women are attacked on the internet regularly and virulently, so it’s possible people had taken to email with particularly galling attacks.

But this claim that being criticized, and corrected, is akin to being “silenced” is becoming a common theme of late. People are responding to criticism as though it is some sort of form of torture. Katie Roiphe, a professional critic, dislikes being criticized so much that she responds by accusing her critics of being “low-level secret policemen in a new totalitarian state.” Weiss believes that when she is criticized, it is “another sign of civilization’s end.”

If I were Roiphe, I might deem these reactions “hysterical” but I dislike the gendered connotations of that word. Men who balk at “political correctness” have been reacting this way for years. Any criticism of their behavior or their opinions is galling, is somehow an attempt to erase them off the face of the earth. “We have a right to free speech!” they shout, but what they really want is a right to be free from criticism, from reflection, from having to think about the experiences of anyone other than themselves.

It is an interesting form of entitlement, this belief that criticism is an infringement on some fundamental right. As Rebecca Traister pointed out in a recent essay for The Cut, published after Roiphe’s much-hyped contra-#MeToo essay in Harper’s, it is “a tic of the powerful… mistaking the right to speech for the right to unquestioned authority.”

In a recent issue of n+1, Dayna Tortorici wrote of this same phenomenon, time-pegging it to the end of 2014: “The right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.”

This is, it should be obvious, not a right that any government or other entity ensures. Alexis Grenell wrote about this last September in a column in the New York Daily News touting the value of “shame speech,” and “the soft power of shame.”

“The First Amendment only protects freedom of expression; there is no right to be heard, or respected,” Grenell explains. “The state of shame is made possible by thousands of people of different backgrounds finally having their voices heard.”

While writers like Roiphe and Weiss are still the ones getting platforms in publications like Harper’s and The New York Times, the internet — that great equalizer — is facilitating this “state of shame.” Twitter might be overrun by Nazis, white supremacists, and angry basement-dwellers making rape and death threats, but it has also increasingly become a place where marginalized voices are able to make themselves heard.

Some people hate that. People you wouldn’t expect! Just this week, Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter at the New York Times, appeared to be so moved watching the teens who survived the school shooting in Florida this week speak on television, he tweeted, “Impressive how articulate and well-educated these kids are from this school. Obviously a good school. Another sad reason for yesterday’s events.”

More than 200 people replied to his tweet, pointing out how hurtful his words were, so Lipton attempted a clarification, “And not saying it would be less sad it [sic] there were poor kids, obviously. Just such a waste to see kids with so much opportunity before them wiped out.” More than a thousand people responded to that one, which anyone who spends any time on Twitter could have predicted.

After a few hours, he deleted those tweets, and wrote a new one. “I deleted an earlier tweet that was misread by many people. What I was saying was not meant to me [sic] disrespectful. Sorry it was read that way.”

This type of reaction is so common, and it confounds me. It is so, so much easier to listen, see that you’ve hurt people (usually people with less institutional and systemic power than you), and say sorry. Then it all goes away!

Bret Stephens, a colleague of Weiss’ in the opinion section at the Times, who seems to live for the thrill of being a bogeyman contrarian, came to Lipton’s defense.

The last line is a reference to the fact that Stephens dislikes criticism so much, he keeps threatening to leave Twitter but then fails to do so.

Opinion writers, in particular, should be able to handle criticism better, given their job is to criticize — and, at their best, honestly and diligently examine different ideas in good faith.

This week, NYT opinion editor James Bennet issued a 1,500-word memo in defense of Bari Weiss, insisting that she, and everyone else in his stable, are operating in good faith. The way he described the opinion section is exactly what its critics want it to be, and what they feel it’s falling short of achieving:

[W]e owe our readers an honest struggle over the right paths ahead, not a pretense that we’re in possession of God’s own map.

That means being willing to challenge our own assumptions; it means being open to counter-arguments even as we advance our own convictions; it means listening to voices that we may object to and even sometimes find obnoxious, provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and openness. It means taking on the toughest arguments on the other side, not the straw men. It means starting from a presumption of good faith, particularly on the part of our colleagues, including those we disagree with. It means having some humility about the possibility that, in the end, the other side might have a point, or more than one.

Bennet! Bennet. This is exactly what we are asking you, and Stephens, and Weiss to do. This is all we want! Take your critics seriously. Don’t dismiss them as too stupid or “insane” to understand your point. You are writers. You are writers of opinion, which ultimately means you are rhetoricians, so your goal is to persuade. If people are arguing with you, it means you have fallen short of that goal. Engage with them! Start from a presumption of good faith! And please, please think about why you think that presumption is owed “particularly” to people who work for the Times, not to those who read it, and love it enough to try to push you to be better.

Bennet’s memo was written after an internal Slack chat was leaked, showing NYT employees frustrated both by Weiss’ tweet and her entitled self-defense earlier this week. One anonymous employee wrote:

i wasn’t here when we had a public editor, but i understand how it worked. it was clear. what i don’t understand now and now what’s unclear is what’s supposed to happen when the same mistakes keep getting made again and again. at what point is the company willing to take the responsibility off the public for calling this stuff out? will the reader center step in? is that even what the reader center is for? i genuinely don’t know!

What seems to be obvious both to us readers and internally at the Times is that the Reader Center is not living up to the legacy of the public editor. As I’ve mentioned previously, I wrote NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan in 2014 — around the time Tortorici references in her essay, when this outcry about the audacity of plebeian critics surfaced. I was frustrated about three separate instances when NYT writers had been criticized for insensitive language and responded by pooh-poohing an uptight, uncomprehending Twitterati. (Sullivan was at the time working on a column in response to the latest incident — Alessandra Stanley referring to Shonda Rhimes as an “angry black woman” — but it was also in the wake of a column about Ray Rice that used florid language to describe his spousal abuse, and the infamous Mike Brown “no angel” article.) The writers were, similarly to Weiss, defending their perceived “right” to use the language they want without considering the impact it would have on readers, and vulnerable readers in particular.

I wrote the following to Sullivan at the time, and I still believe it today:

Journalism does not occur in a vacuum. When your artful words are sent out into the world, they have the power to hurt people who are particularly vulnerable.

That these articles get past not only a writer but — I assume — multiple editors without one person stopping to think about the effects the language will have, not in their stylistic quality, but in their existence in the world of readers who may be victims of violence or domestic violence or systemic discrimination and racism, is absurd.

Pretty writing is not more important than empathy and respect for people with less power and less of an ability to have their voices heard.

The problem here is not Twitter. It is a culture in which a writer can receive criticism from people their writing has harmed, and respond not with a gracious, empathetic apology, but with the dismissive arrogance it must take to claim that anyone who disagrees with you just isn’t smart enough to understand your point.

If Bennet wants people to assume his writers are operating in good faith, they need to show that. For now, Weiss has shown exactly the opposite, both in her work (as when she claimed the motto of contemporary feminism is “Believe All Women” or reductively cited a vague Instagram post in a claim of a black activist’s anti-police bias), and this week’s dustup. Tom Scocca outlined this well on — of course — Twitter:

Here’s the thing. Weiss, Stephens, and Roiphe claim they want a gentler, kinder discourse. That’s a good goal. It can be exhausting to be patient in the face of microaggressions, especially for people who have been on the receiving end of them for so long. But if we can muster it, I have no doubt it will lead to a better discourse.

The flipside of that, though, is that Weiss, Stephens, Roiphe et al need to come down from their mountain and actually listen to and consider the criticism leveled against them. They have to try to be better right along with the rest of us.

Moira Donegan is the Anti-Katie Roiphe We Need

Participants at the Take Back The Workplace March and #MeToo Survivors March & Rally on November 12, 2017 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/FilmMagic)

I have run out of jokes about how long this week or month or year has been, not least because this is the fourth time I’ve rewritten a piece I started on Tuesday.

At first it was about Katie Roiphe and the news that she planned to expose the creator of the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet in Harper’s March issue. But then Roiphe told The New York Times that her piece didn’t name a creator of the list:

In a later interview, Ms. Roiphe said that she herself did not know the identity of the person who started the list and added, “I would never put in the creator of the list if they didn’t want to be named.”

Yet, in an email to the woman who created the list — now publicly known to be writer and former New Republic editor Moira Donegan — a Harper’s fact checker had written: “Katie identifies you as a woman widely believed to be one of the creators of the Shitty Men in Media List. Were you involved in creating the list? If not, how would you respond to this allegation?”

This is strange, given that Roiphe’s sole contact with Donegan was a single email in December asking if she had any interest in speaking about the “feminist moment” for a Harper’s piece. Donegan declined, having no idea that Roiphe suspected her of creating the list or had any intention of exposing her as having done so.

It’s not uncommon for fact checkers to assist in the reporting process, as researchers. Still, Roiphe’s approach comes off as duplicitous, even cowardly. Was Katie Roiphe, a woman who has long delighted in publishing contrarian takedowns of feminism — who has for more than two decades been praised, sometimes begrudgingly, for seeming impervious to and even relishing the anger she brought out in other women — afraid to be honest with Donegan? Why would she leave the hard questions to her fact checker, lie to The New York Times, mislead Donegan, and not dare to email her more than once?

I can’t tell you the answer to that for sure, because I emailed Roiphe to ask and she hasn’t written back. I also emailed New York University’s journalism program, where Roiphe is a professor and a director, and got no response. I contacted Harper’s editor James Marcus, who politely directed me to their publicist, Giulia Melucci, who replied: “We can talk about the piece when the piece is published.”

* *

Roiphe did take to Twitter to defend herself, a bit, employing language so classically Roiphean, I almost laughed:

People who criticize Roiphe are “confused.” They lack “perspective.” In the Times piece about the backlash against her, she characterized it as “hysteria.”

It’s stunning to watch Roiphe use the language of gaslighting with such ease. But of course she did: she’s been doing it for a quarter century, ever since she made her name in the early ’90s by claiming in a New York Times op-ed that men were the true victims of date rape. She’s dined out on the attention ever since, recycling that position: the Woody Allen of cultural criticism.

She has long seemed to see herself as the enfant terrible of the feminist movement, even when the movement itself saw her largely as a privileged dilettante with rich parents, one of whom helped facilitate her ability to be made into a cultural icon. Jennifer Gonnerman wrote well about this in her 1994 piece for The Baffler, “The Selling of Katie Roiphe.” In her piece, Roiphe isn’t a powerful supervillain, she’s a mouthpiece manufactured by The New York Times to shut down a movement that didn’t serve its purposes:

By making Katie Roiphe the new celebrity feminist, the Times aimed to create the illusion of being on the cutting edge of sexual politics. Its discovery and single-handed championing of this latest variety of feminism may have ostensibly served to “further debate,” but it actually did little more than prop up the Times‘ long-standing opposition to feminism’s more radical strains. Coming out of the mouth of a young, self-proclaimed feminist, the idea that date rape is the product of young women’s hysteria had legitimacy.

In that initial Times piece — which she later strung out from an already-long 600 words into a 200-page tome that some misguided Gender Studies programs still inflict on college students — she decided that it can’t possibly be true that one in four women on college campuses are victims of rape, because she hasn’t heard about it. Is it any wonder that her peers did not think it was a good idea to confide in Roiphe, a woman who wrote about them with condescension so lacking in empathy that it comes off almost pathological?

Enter Moira Donegan, the creator of the fabled Shitty Media Men list. Donegan “outed herself,” so to speak, in a magnificent essay published Wednesday night by The Cut:

We spent hours teasing out how these men, many of whom we knew to be intelligent and capable of real kindness, could behave so crudely and cruelly toward us. And this is another toll that sexual harassment can take on women: It can make you spend hours dissecting the psychology of the kind of men who do not think about your interiority much at all.

I could quote endlessly from it, but you should read it yourself, because it is a masterpiece — and thank heavens. It feels so cynical to say that at first I could only whisper it to select friends, but: can you imagine if Donegan was even one percent less talented as a writer? Can you imagine if this piece was even slightly imperfect? Donegan was up against impossible stakes and cleared them with air to spare. She writes honestly and bravely, with grace and clarity, perfectly articulating concepts and feelings that so many of us have been grasping at for months without ever quite gripping.

I have known Donegan was the creator of the list since I first saw it, back in October, because I am a reporter and that is a thing I cannot turn off: I figured it out, found her private Twitter, and requested to follow her. She accepted and followed me back, and after she took the list down, I sent her a message.

“I’m sorry you had to take it down, but thank you for making it. It was the only thing that made me feel not full of despair this week,” I told her.

She thanked me back, and told me she took it down because she was afraid she was putting the women who added names and allegations in danger. “It’s so fucked up that the consequences for speaking out about this stuff are so much greater than the consequences for doing it,” she said. “I hope one day the world deserves all of these amazing women.”

In the months that followed, she became a source of comfort for me. When I was frustrated by some of the backlash, I went to her, and she understood. I could see why she was a nexus in this whisper network, why people trusted her, her ability to make people feel seen and heard and understood. She is, in a way, the anti-Roiphe.

* *

I say that being a reporter is a thing I can’t turn off, but the truth is, before the list, that instinct in me felt snuffed out. After the first Harvey Weinstein broke, I felt suffocated for days, like I was being buried alive. I didn’t know why. I should’ve felt exhilarated, no? Women were getting justice, and it was all thanks to journalism, the great love of my life. Why couldn’t I see this as a the good thing it was? Why did I instead feel like I was dying? I cancelled plans, burrowed under the covers, and sobbed tears that felt like they both were and weren’t my own.

And then someone shared the list with me. I still acutely remember the feeling of watching it change and grow in front of my eyes. At first I thought the feeling was exhilaration, but then I realized it was relief. It was the feeling of having an extremely heavy burden lifted from you. Do you know that feeling? A magical sort of lightness. As I told Donegan at one point, it felt meaningful, even powerful, amid so much powerlessness.

Jodi Kantor mentioned in an interview with The Cut that she couldn’t have done the Weinstein stories without her reporting partner Megan Twohey (though many media outlets seem determined to give Kantor sole credit). She and Twohey needed each other, not just because it was a monumental reporting lift, but because they needed someone to share the burden of their experience. She said:

One of the saving graces of this process has been the partnership with Megan because this was a responsibility that we each needed to share with another person. We barely knew each other when we teamed up on this story. Not only were we in constant communication with each other and not only did we compare notes, check judgment, and plot strategy on those matters great and small, but the weight of this reporting is such that you just need somebody to share it with. A lot of the stories we heard are incredibly disturbing, and you don’t want to carry those alone.

That kind of support is vital, and not easy to come by. For decades, women have feared speaking out in part because of what a solitary and often isolating experience it was. The internet has been a gamechanger in this regard, and there’s a certain irony in Harper’s — a legacy publication so resistant to the World of Online — not understanding that. The list’s accessibility online connected us to one another, even anonymously. The #MeToo movement on Twitter — which Roiphe no doubt will take issue with as well — did that too. These things made us safer, they made us bolder, and most importantly, they allowed us to support one another in a way we never could before.

That’s what was happening that night as I watched the list grow and tracked the number of people logged into the document. Twenty, then 40, then 70. Even before some of the men on the list were investigated and resigned or fired, seeing all these women put down on paper the things we all knew and burned with the knowledge of felt like the most immense relief. We’d been sharing them among ourselves, whispering them without names or details, partly because we were so sure nothing would ever change, and partly because we were terrified of being branded problematic or troublesome by the older generations whose approval we needed to succeed in this industry and craved after watching them pave the way before us.

In those fluttery, self-conscious whispers lay so much self-doubt and self-blame. This happened; does it sound as bad as it felt? Do you think I’m overreacting? Am I weak? Seeing the charges in words on a page, for someone for whom words on a page are the greatest things imaginable, felt like we were finally throwing out all that harmful self-criticism and holding our heads up and really finally saying, this isn’t how it’s going to be anymore.

It is no wonder that some women reached the conclusion that to be strong and fierce, one must be unbothered.

A foundational premise of Roiphe’s initial argument back in the ’90s was that to speak your mistreatment aloud is to be a victim. This is the truth in which many of us were raised — and it was the truth for a long time, because of the repercussions when women did speak up. Death threats, rape threats, job loss, public humiliation, and worse. Some believed this because it was what they saw with their own clear eyes; others, like Roiphe, out of some calculus that to be women who were not problematic to men was the way forward.

But it is not the truth in which we will thrive. To paraphrase Roiphe’s own words from her coming-out column in 1993, that assertion is not fact. It is advertising a mood. And — unfortunately for Roiphe and for Harper’s, both of whom, it seems, would prefer things stay ever-the-same — the mood has changed.

The women speaking out these past few months, Donegan among them, have changed this math. To speak up is not weakness, it is courage. After Donegan’s piece was published, I watched so many people, men and women, herald her bravery, and it struck me that the momentum of this moment may now be unstoppable. What a rush that is. What a rush, and what an enormous relief.

Longreads Best of 2017: Local Reporting

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in local reporting.

Sarah Smarsh
Writer covering socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The New Yorker and Harper’s online, The Guardian, Guernica, and many others.

The #MeToo Movement in Kansas (Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry, The Kansas City Star)

While the spotlight falls on sexual-misconduct allegations in the nation’s centers of power — Washington, New York, Hollywood — reporters across the country localized the revolutionary #MeToo moment on their own turf, including often overlooked and unglamorous places like my home state of Kansas. When I opened my morning newspaper to this lengthy feature on alleged sexual misconduct at the Kansas State Capitol, I was struck by the tenacity of the reporting in a digital-media era rife with emotional, partisan opinion pieces. Kansas City Star reporters Hunter Woodall, Kelsey Ryan, and Bryan Lowry spared neither side of the aisle as they hounded male legislators and gave voice to women who were previously silenced.

As a personal essayist who began as an investigative reporter, I hold no writing in higher esteem than that which does the hard work of digging for obscured facts, without which a million think pieces could never exist. This single installment of the ongoing coverage of the statehouse scandal quotes some fifteen interviewed sources: four female former interns (two named and two anonymous), two male Democratic representatives, a male intern-program director, two university spokespersons, a female Republican senate president, a male Republican house speaker, a female former Democratic staffer, the male director of the legislature’s human resources department, a second Republican state senator, and a male Democratic house minority leader.

This last source, a Democratic candidate for governor in the state’s crowded 2018 gubernatorial race, is some liberals’ best hope to defeat far-right candidate Kris Kobach. Even if the reporters’ own politics might be liberal, as journalists do perhaps lean, they didn’t allow the legislator a pass, giving readers not just his statements but also when he “tried to change the topic,” “refused to answer the question” and “demanded to know” whether he’d been accused of harassment. This is local reporting at its finest and bravest — government watchdogs shining a light where secrets might live. This is the work of a free press that sets its society free, no opinion required.


Gustavo Arellano
Former editor-in-chief, OC Weekly, contributor to Curbed LA.

Orange County’s Informant Scandal Yields Evidence of Forensic Science Deception in Murder Trials (R. Scott Moxley, OC Weekly)

My former colleague at OC Weekly, R. Scott Moxley, is the most underrated investigative reporter in the United States. His work at the paper over the past 21 years has resulted in a six-year prison sentence for our former sheriff, the end of congressional and state assemblymen’s careers, and the freeing of at least three people wrongfully convicted of crimes. Last year alone, six murder convictions covered by Moxley were overturned.

And he continues. In December, Moxley published this blockbuster exposé in which forensic scientists switched their conclusions to help prosecutors win shoddy murder cases. It was the latest Moxley blockbuster in the so-called “Orange County Snitch Scandal,” which saw prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies use jailhouse informants to illegally get information and win cases. Moxley’s work proves again the value in local news, and especially in the alt-weekly world. Long may Mox reign!


Katie Honan
Former DNAinfo reporter

Dignity In Danger (Kristin Dalton, Staten Island Advance)

In February, the Staten Island Advance published a multimedia package focused on the borough’s developmentally-disabled adults. “Dignity in Danger” is a well-reported piece of advocacy journalism, featuring the stories of those struggling, as well as the response of the city and state. It was compassionate journalism that held officials accountable for their lack of support.  

What made this piece of local journalism stand out to me was how comprehensive it was. For any local paper struggling to keep audiences and stay on top of what’s happening, it was an impressive project on an often-overlooked subject.

For their coverage, the Advance also dug into their archive of their coverage of the Willowbrook State School, where hundreds of developmentally-disabled children were abused for decades. It says a lot about local journalism to have people on staff to recognize that and have the familiarity with a place’s history.


Simon Bredin
Editor-in-chief, Torontoist

Where the Small Town American Dream Lives On (Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker)

After the presidential election, there was a sudden vogue for profiles of small towns in the grips of despair. So it was a pleasure to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s feature about Orange City, Iowa, and its “pure, hermetic culture.” MacFarquhar’s article is a delight for many reasons, not least its depiction of the endearing eccentricities of the town’s Dutch heritage. The author clearly grasps the centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, driving some townspeople away and luring others back.  But what makes the article profound is the way it describes Orange City’s sense of place, which inspires a loyalty among the residents critical to the town’s continued success.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met

A Washington County That Went for Trump Is Shaken as Immigrant Neighbors Start Disappearing (Nina Shapiro, The Seattle Times)

Voting has consequences, as story after story in the wake of last November’s surprising electoral outcome has endeavored to show. Yet to my mind, few if any of the attempts to explain the Trump voter have landed. This one does. That’s because Nina Shapiro doesn’t let her sources off the hook. The people in this story say they didn’t know they were voting so cruelly, but their friends and neighbors — arrested or deported or both — nevertheless paid the price. Shapiro, to her credit, is able to find the humanity amid the folly.


Bethany Barnes
Education reporter for The Oregonian

Overlooked (Cary Aspinwall, The Dallas Morning News)

Praise for journalism has a standard repertoire. The old chestnuts include “shine a light” and “give voice to the voiceless.” Cary Aspinwall’s investigation for The Dallas Morning News truly earned such appraisal. Aspinwall looked where no one else was looking and showed her readers the human face of a problem that wasn’t being considered. Her investigation revealed that more mothers are going to jail in Texas, and that no one pays attention to what happens to their children when they do.

“Overlooked” is deftly told through an intimate portrait of five sisters:

The voices of these children are rarely heard — which is why the five Booker sisters agreed to tell the story of their mother’s arrests and their own abandonment by the criminal justice system. They told it over months, chatting in a bug-infested apartment complex, sharing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos at a QuikTrip, trying tacos near the juvenile courthouse, driving almost three hours to visit their mother in prison.

Aspinwall’s extensive survey of mothers in jail gives readers a chance to hear perspectives we almost never hear. Her shoe-leather reporting to find people who could speak to the problem makes the data she found meaningful and personal.


Julia Wick
Former editor-in-chief, LAist

Behind a $13 shirt, a $6-an-hour worker (Natalie Kitroteff and Victoria Kim, The Los Angeles Times)

Natalie Kitroeff and Victoria Kim’s damning exposé nails how fast fashion giants like Forever 21 avoid liability for wage theft violations at the factories where their clothes are made. The piece, which explains how the retailer “avoids paying factory workers’ wage claims through a tangled labyrinth of middlemen,” has national and international implications. It is also very much a local story.

Garment workers making $6 an hour “pinning Forever 21 tags on trendy little shirts” in stifling factories right here in Los Angeles. Although most manufacturing has migrated overseas, L.A. still holds onto a small production niche, which is largely staffed by underpaid, immigrant workers. (Little-known fact: Southern California is the nation’s garment manufacturing capitol). Forever 21 itself is a Los Angeles-based company and an immigrant story: It was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 by a couple who had emigrated from South Korea.

Kitroeff and Kim’s piece masterfully illustrates the layered steps behind the production of every garment, explaining labor law and humanizing the lives and wage claims of workers. Their reporting offered a powerful indictment of a massive retailer — and our own complicity every time we buy that $13 shirt — drawing much-needed attention to worker abuses in our own backyard.


Michelle Legro
Senior editor, Longreads

Lawrence Tabak’s reporting on Foxconn in Wisconsin for Belt Magazine

It began as a shady deal with a big promise: Wisconsin taxpayers would give Foxconn $3 billion to open a plant that would provide 13,000 jobs, ostensibly for locals. Belt Magazine’s Lawrence Tabak has been following the deal for months: He tracked down workers at a Foxconn plant in Indiana and discovered that the quality of these jobs was low for locals, and that management favored Taiwanese nationals in management, and also relied on undocumented workers hidden during ICE raids. In a series of stories, he explained step-by-step how governor Scott Walker was taken in by Foxconn’s deal and sold it to the state legislature:

The proposed plant combined everything that an ambitious Republican governor could want. Not only a lot of jobs, but manufacturing jobs. Never mind that these were not the sort of jobs that would revive the Rust Belt, let alone jobs that would employ a significant number of Wisconsinites.

Tabak’s reporting was journalism in action, even making its way to the Wisconsin State Senate, “which used Belt’s reporting in railing against Foxconn’s heavy reliance on H-1B visa holders for skilled positions at its stateside facilities.”

Tabak also did one of the best man-on-the-ground reports that had nothing in common with the kind of parachute reporting on Trump voters that was so reviled this year. Staking out an apple orchard next door to the proposed plant in Racine County, he asked the workers there what they thought of Foxconn and it’s promise of jobs. The workers of Apple Holler saw only environmental pollution on the horizon, and the betrayal of what this area of Wisconsin does best, and has always done best: agriculture.


Ethan Chiel
Contributing editor and fact checker, Longreads

How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire (Andrew Granato, Stanford Politics)

Campus politics is local politics par excellence, and while Peter Thiel may be mediocre at his secondary pursuits, like investing and vampirism, he is by all accounts an excellent right-wing campus political operative. Thiel has spent nearly three decades trying to trigger libs at his alma mater, Stanford, not least by continuing to support the Stanford Review, a conservative publication he founded as an undergraduate in the late ‘80s. Andrew Granato really got the goods in his smart, even-handed account of how Thiel has cultivated the Review as both a source for hires and business associates and a way to try and keep his own, largely contrarianism-based sense of politics alive at a liberal university. It also serves as a reminder that Silicon Valley is very much a place and not just a metonymic device.

Maybe We’ll Register Your Marriage After You Walk the Bomb-Sniffing Dog

Bride and groom are symbolically tied together during the traditional Hindu ceremony.

At Harper’s, Mansi Choksi tells the story of Neetu and Dawinder, a young couple from rural India who flee to a safe house run by the Love Commandos. The young couple wanted a love marriage — as opposed to an arranged marriage, which is still common in India — so they paid the Commandos to perform a marriage ceremony, register the union with the government, and protect them from physical harm at the hands of enraged family members incensed by a marriage against caste tradition. Love Commando services are expensive, and they also exact a different and predatory price: young couples are expected to run errands, walk the bomb-sniffing dog, cook, clean, and keep house for their would-be protectors while under their watch.

Across the Indian countryside, romantic relationships can easily become ensnared by taboos. Sometimes, the consequences are fatal. In 2007, the bodies of Manoj and Babli, lovers from the same village and the same gohtra—believed to be descendants of a common ancestor—were found in gunnysacks dumped in a canal not far from Kakheri. Babli’s family, which was wealthier, had forced her to drink pesticide; they strangled Manoj to death. With support from leaders in their village, Babli’s parents saw the murders as the only punishment commensurate with their humiliation. This is a common view: according to the latest count released to the public, 251 honor killings occurred in India in 2015.

“Hello, Love Commandos,” the voice on the line said.

“We have come,” Dawinder said.

“We have been waiting for you.”

The Love Commandos, on the other hand, advertises a one-time fee that covers the cost of a wedding ceremony and registration; couples are invited to stay as long as they need. Perhaps more important is Sachdev’s promise to protect them even when it compromises his safety. Armed men and disgraced relatives routinely come knocking, he said, and at least four khaps have issued bounties for his death. None have made good on their promise, but he and his colleagues have been beaten. “Look, we are madmen,” he explained. “We are not scared of dying.”

Neetu and Dawinder had been in the shelter for several weeks, but Sach­dev still had not taken their paperwork to the registrar. Whenever they asked, he assured them that he would get to it as soon as he could. Sometimes he would say there was too much traffic or that he was feeling ill. In the meantime, he would ask them for money to help cover the cost of his hospitality. As days progressed, according to Dawinder, they paid Sachdev fifty thousand rupees ($775) in unidentified general fees. Neetu would remind him that marriage registration cost only a few thousand rupees; Sach­dev would look hurt and say that he had treated them like his own children, but now she was bringing money between them.

While they waited, Dawinder and the other young men at the shelter were expected to run errands for Harsh Malhotra, the chief coordinator, a hulking man with a short temper. Whenever he rang a bell, they were to gather on the balcony to receive instructions. He’d have them go out to buy him a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey, play cricket with his nephew, mop, sweep, or walk Romeo. The women stayed inside to clean and cook.

Read the story

Bumpy Ride: Why America’s Roads Are in Tatters

Longreads Pick

“Roads symbolize one of the fundamental contracts between a government and its citizens,” Dale Maharidge reports in Harper’s Magazine, with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “If the roads are failing, it means government is failing.”

Published: Nov 1, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

Your Own Personal Jesus-Lite

Elizabeth Harper — writer, photographer, historian, lover of Catholic death rituals — traveled to the tiny town of Bonito, Italy, just outside Naples, to visit Zio Vincenzo. Long-lost relative? No, mummified corpse of a nameless Neapolitan, trapped in Purgatory and venerated by locals for his ability to grant miracles. If the patron saint of your particular issue is ignoring you, try a soul with a little more time on its hands — the how-to is in her Lapham’s Quarterly piece:

When a saint doesn’t respond at first, the petitioner may assume the saint is too busy. In that case, one option is to threaten the saint with replacement. (The citizens of Naples tried this in 1799 when they threw the bust of their formerly beloved patron, Saint Gennaro, into the sea after his dried blood miraculously liquefied in the presence of a French general and seemed to consent to the occupation of Naples. The citizens briefly replaced him with Saint Anthony, who proved ineffective against a volcanic eruption and was fired as well.) But if that doesn’t work, there’s another option that’s even more extraordinary. The petitioner may set her sights a little lower and direct her prayers to a soul in purgatory—a place where flawed souls on their way to heaven are purified in fire. The hope is that since the souls of these regular people are more plentiful and receive less attention than the saints, they will be happy to hear any prayer directed their way. They may respond even faster and be more likely to grant favors if the living also pray for a little refrisco for them—a temporary relief from the flames of purgatory that is supposed to feel like a cold drink on a hot day. It’s a perfectly logical solution: when the demand for Catholic souls in the afterlife is too high for heaven to accommodate, add to the supply by including souls in purgatory.

(If you’re thinking, “Ugh, there’s so much going on in the world, why do I need to spend ten minutes reading about a long-dead Italian,” I offer two responses: one, because it’s fascinating, and two, because Harper’s writing is full of lines like this: “Traffic lights dot the streets of Naples like rhinestones. I’m not being romantic—I mean they’re shiny and worthless.”)

Read the story

Bootlegging Jane’s Addiction

Joe Hughes/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | November 2017 | 26 minutes (6,465 words)

On a sunny day in 1989 when I was just 14, I heard Jane’s Addiction for the first time.

I was at my friend Nate’s house. As I sat on his bedroom’s itchy tan carpet, near the waterbed with the imitation leather rim, we watched their debut record spin. It was a live recording, and like many teenagers whose musical awakening came before the internet, we’d inherited it from a cooler elder — Nate’s sister’s boyfriend.

The album was recorded at a club called The Roxy, on the Sunset Strip. As a concert recording, some fans called it “the live album.” We called it “Triple X,” after the indie label that released it. Unlike other live records where applause fades in before the music starts, Triple X launched right in with no introduction: fast drums, soloing guitar, and a high-pitched banshee singer howling cryptic lyrics that went way over my 14-year-old head: “Oh, mama lick on me / I’m as tasty as a red plum / Baby thumb / Wanna make you love.” The song was called “Trip Away.” I had no idea what tripping was, but the music slayed me.

After a blazing crescendo, the audience clapped, seconds passed, and a slow bass line played a new rumbling melody. The drummer pounded a single beat over it: boom. Then two more ─ boom boom ─ building tension. The guitarist slid his pick down the guitar strings, smearing a wicked echo across the rhythm, then the banshee yelled “Goddamn!” and broke into “Whores.” “I don’t want much man, give a little / I’m gonna take my chances if I get ’em. Yeah!”

To a middle class kid in Phoenix, Arizona, this music had a primal abandon that I hadn’t yet encountered, but whose wildness attracted me.

Read more…

We’re Going Through Hell, and Men Need to Join Us There

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I know what you’re thinking: Not another sexual harassment post. Bear with me.

I’ve spoken to many women over the past few weeks who feel exhausted by the current news cycle, I count myself among them: the endless onslaught of horrific stories, interspersed with the occasional, extremely bad non-apology.

I know it’s tempting to look away, and it’s fine if you have to; please take care of yourself. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad feminist. But it’s important the stories keep coming out, that the issue remains in the public discourse. It feels like we are in a moment of momentum, working our way towards something better, however clumsy, messy, and painful the process can be. It’s a little cheesy, but I keep thinking of the quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” This momentum feels like hell, and we have to keep going.

Read more…

Widespread Abuse in Kids’ Sports Shows How Institutions Enable Predators

(Getty Images)

Sexual harassment and abuse existed in our institutions long before recent allegations against men in power like Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roy Price came to light. How do institutions protect and enable these predators, and say things like, “Honestly, it was not on my radar,” when abuse surfaces? This is the question Alexandra Starr tackles in her Harper’s Magazine story examining how the U.S. Olympic Committee inadequately addressed sexual abuse in youth athletics. Institutions like the U.S.O.C. have often turned a blind eye to allegations of abuse until they’re forced to address them in court:

Marci Hamilton — the head of Child U.S.A., an organization that works to prevent child abuse and neglect — travels the country drafting legislation and testifying in statehouses on behalf of sexual assault survivors. She told me that, beyond money for therapy, window provisions help provide victims with recognition from the state that a wrong has occurred. “It is validating,” she said. “It can quiet the voices in their heads telling them they were somehow at fault.” For others reticent to come forward, watching people publicly hold their perpetrator accountable is key.

Hamilton has observed that child abuse at the Catholic Church has generated the most attention, but she finds youth athletics to be no less hazardous. “We have reports of abuse in every possible sports organization — whether peewee or little league or high school,” she said. “The extreme power imbalance between a coach and an athlete — not just an adult and child but a coach and an athlete — creates conditions for keeping secrets. And so long as secrets are kept, the perpetrators are protected.” Lawsuits, she added, “are the only way to force these institutions to disclose what’s in their files.” When SafeSport launched, she wrote that “the U.S.O.C. has moved at a glacial pace,” grappling with allegations of assault over the past fifteen years; “its actions have more often protected problematic coaches than children.” She told me, “What always comes out in the end is that the institution knew more about abuse than just about anybody else. They are also the ones most dedicated to silence.”

Read the story