Search Results for: Huffington

Honey Bees, Worker Bees, and the Economic Violence of Land Grabs

Don Farrall / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Melissa Chadburn | Longreads | April 2019 | 12 minutes (3,024 words)

 

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit organization.

“One bad thing about me is that I don’t give a shit about the environment.” That’s what I told my smart, edgy friend when we were walking to get coffee one day. I admitted that I suck at recycling, and that what I care about is workers, “not like, being vegan and shit.”

“Yea fuck those bumper stickers with the panda on them,” she replied.

The truth is I didn’t think those worries were for me, the type of planning and research it takes to be green. That was a concern for people living a different quality of life, people who carried around large glass bottles filled with distilled water, ladies in lululemon pants who consistently applied Burt’s bees lip balm, ate cacao energy balls, and drove hybrid vehicles. No, caring about the planet was off limits for me.
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How the Shock Jock Became the Outrage Jock

Ben Hider / Invision / AP, Jeff Chiu / AP, Charles Dharapak / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 8 minutes (2,111 words)

In the past, the bow tie seemed to hold him together, kind of. Tucker Carlson had always been as red-faced and obstreperous as so many other conservative pundits, but he had never been known to be “cunty” or “faggot”-level offensive. Still, it wasn’t much of a shock earlier this week when progressive watchdog Media Matters unearthed him spouting slurs like that — a couple of racist remarks rounded out the misogyny and homophobia — during a series of appearances on Bubba the Love Sponge Clem’s radio show between 2006 and 2011. From Monday to Tuesday, after the first recordings surfaced, Tucker Carlson Tonight hemorrhaged almost half its advertisers.

That bow tie had been a flourish of propriety: a strip of cloth separating him from a loudmouth like Howard Stern, the “shock jock” who looks and acts like a dollar store rock star, grabbing his crotch for whoever will listen. But he dropped it the year he appeared on that radio show. It was Stern who hired Bubba the Love Sponge Clem (yes, that’s his legal name) in the mid-2000s to host a show on his second satellite radio channel, and it was on that show that Carlson crossed the line. That was where the shock jock and the political commentator proved that they were one and the same — the former played off conservatism, the latter played it up, but both relied on its foundation. “Well, you’re talking about God and illegals,” Carlson told Clem. “I thought we were just going to be talking about blow jobs.”

But what’s the difference, really? Blow jobs were once used for shock value. Now it’s “illegals.” The punch line being that neither one of them is transgressive in the end.

* * *

No one used the words shock jock for Joe Pyne, the host of It’s Your Nickel (that’s a reference to pay phones, kids, and I’m including myself here) who pioneered in-your-face talk radio in the ’50s and went on to create TV’s The Joe Pyne Show, which sometimes devolved into actual physical altercations between him and guest. No one really knew what to make of him. His unconventional style — dressed-up to dress down “pinkos” and “women’s libbers” and riff on, rather than read, reports — was neither news nor entertainment. It seemed to be best described (well, The New York Times and Time both did anyway) as an “electronic peepshow.” The personality-free press of the time considered Walter Cronkite the most trusted man in America and Johnny Carson the funniest, but Pyne, with his syndicated show on more than 200 radio outlets, was the most Machiavellian. “When it comes to manipulating media,” Icons of Talk author Donna Halper told Smithsonian Magazine, “he was the father of them all.”

Pyne briefly descended from his soapbox in the mid-’60s — for a week’s “vacation” — after bringing a gun to his show during the Watts riots, suggesting the world wasn’t quite yet ready for his kind of conservative appeal. It took until the mid-’80s, when the FCC was no longer so hard-assed and political correctness was all the rage, for Howard Stern to turn the shock jock into a thing. The idea was that PC America was muting real America, and personalities like his were there to liberate our ids … usually on the way to work. “They were pushing the limits of what you could hear on the public airwaves,” TALKERS Magazine publisher Michael Harrison told Thrillist of mavericks like Pyne and Don Imus, who set the stage for Stern. “That was the key to the whole thing: that it was on the ‘sacred public airwaves.’”

Full disclosure: I have always hated Howard Stern. His banality offends me: “The closest I came to making love to a black woman was I masturbated to a picture of Aunt Jemima on a pancake box” — that’s the kind of joke he makes. It’s the sort of quip that leaves a dumb bro stuck in 1992 in stitches. To be offensive your words have to have power, and his … don’t. He swears a lot and cajoles his guests into talking about fucking and snorting and it’s all very Free Speech, Motherfuckers! He can be sexist and racist and classist, because, hey! He’s sexist about men too! He’s racist to everyone! He drags every class!

Sorry, I just fell asleep.

The rebellion is a pose, because at the heart of Stern and all the other shock jocks is conservatism — 2.1 kids, strong moral fiber. They can joke about fucking and inhaling, because they ostensibly aren’t doing either. So what positions itself against PC America, in fact, at its core, feeds into it — the conservatism is the rebellion. Knowing that, you can see how Don Imus calling the members of Rutgers’ women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos” can happen as late as 2007 on his radio show Imus in the Morning (he was fired by CBS and NBC, then hired by ABC). As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker 10 years before Imus’s offense, personalities like Stern and Mancow Muller and Opie and Anthony appeal to the “audience that feels put upon by a new set of rules — sexual harassment guidelines, the taboo against certain kinds of speech — and wants release, if only in the privacy of the drive to work.”

The audience meaning white heterosexual men. The shock jock industry itself is predominantly white men (Stern’s foil, Robin Quivers, is a black woman, but she has never been the star attraction). Which is not to say that women can’t be as “offensive,” it’s just that the people in charge of hiring them would prefer them to be barefoot and pregnant. There are shockingly few exceptions. Wendy Williams, who rode the wave of ’90s hip-hop and shamelessly confronted celebrities like Whitney Houston with tabloid gossip (she also had a bad habit of trying to out rappers) was christened by New York magazine in 2005 as the “shock jockette.” She was “the black Howard Stern” right down to the middle-class moralism. Other than Williams, the female media personalities who cause offense — Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham — tend toward conservative commentary, presumably because the men on the top floor think they will be less likely to break a nail in those environs. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” is a thing Ingraham came up with — a misogynistic comment cloaked in doublespeak.

This genre of radio personality was dubbed by my colleague Ethan Chiel as the “outrage jock,” the political version of a culture and entertainment-aligned predecessor, who arose in the late 1980s after the FCC regulations on political talk became less clear. This is where a bow tie comes in handy. The outrage jocks market themselves as transgressive, but instead of fighting conservative America, they uphold it, a stance they brand subversive in a sea of progressive liberal media. Rush Limbaugh, who has the most popular talk radio show in America — 15.5 million listeners, according to Talk Magazine — was dubbed by National Review as the “Leader of the Opposition” back in the ’90s. “Rush took radio at a time when the norm was basically NPR. He comes into that church and blows it up,” radio host John Ziegler told The Washington Post in 2015. “Our presidential politics have become a kind of church. The media says, ‘You’re not allowed to say this, or this, or that, because we’re in church.’ People are sick of that.”

So: Stern 2.0, except instead of shouting about pussy, Limbaugh — not to mention Glenn Beck and Michael Savage — shouts about policy. You may remember him calling women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” in 2012 for advocating for contraceptive insurance coverage. “She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception,” said the man who has been married four times. “She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

Limbaugh needs a brushup on his sex work nomenclature, among other things. But if you want to talk about pimp: Janet Jackson’s nipple ultimately killed the shock jock. In case you aren’t old, it happened during a performance of “Rock Your Body” at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show in 2004, when Justin Timberlake tore off the right cup of Jackson’s bustier, exposing her breast. (Per Jackson, the red bra underneath the rubber was supposed to stay behind, but came away accidentally.) In response, more than 500,000 complaints, all of them from people presumably with nipples of their own, were reportedly lodged with the FCC. President Bush responded two years later by signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which raised the penalty for broadcasting “indecency” tenfold. With that, Howard Stern fucked off to satellite radio and the rest of the shock jocks kind of followed suit. Tucker Carlson was what was left behind.

* * *

“Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely.” Tucker Carlson did not say that. That was Donald Trump in 2013 talking to Howard Stern about a pregnant Kim Kardashian in a radio show appearance that reemerged during his election campaign. On the same show, across almost two decades, the future president also agreed that his daughter was “a piece of ass” and dismissed flat-chested women and women over 35 (thank God). For all his work to divide the nation, Trump had a big hand in bringing shock and outrage jocks together, dissolving any sort of wall (!) between them. “If the political class is appalled by the notion that anything from the morass of ’90s shock-jock radio could become part of a presidential race,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in Politico in 2016, “it may be just as surprising to Stern’s fans, who proudly embraced the outsider-ness of a guy who couldn’t seem further from inside-the-Beltway political chatter.” TALKERS’s Harrison has called Trump “the first shock-politician.”

By the time Trump entered politics, shock jocks were no longer defining the culture and conservative commentators were filling the vacuum. They entered the mainstream on networks like Fox and the intellectual dark web via Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin. “The shock jocks weren’t defeated,” wrote Dan Jackson at Thrillist. “They went viral.” This is where Tucker Carlson fits in. He called his resurfaced xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic comments from Bubba the Love Sponge’s show (he described women as “extremely primitive,” supported child rapist Warren Jeffs, and compared the behavior of Muslims to animals) “naughty,” then equated contrition with betrayal. “We’ve always apologized when we’re wrong and will continue to do that,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday. “That’s what decent people do; they apologize. But we will never bow to the mob.”

Almost 70 years after the first shock jock hit the air, Carlson was toeing the same party line as his predecessors. “They claim that they’re just entertainers and yet they deliver this toxic mix of pseudo journalism, misinformation, hate-filled speech, jokes,” Rory O’Connor, author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio, told The Guardian in 2009. “It’s all bound together so when it’s convenient for them to be entertainers they say, hey, it’s all just a joke. But when it’s not, they say they’re giving you information that you need.” Carlson’s comments were only shocking because they veered so sharply away from Beltway politics; with his regressive approach no longer couched in policy, they revealed him for the person he is. And even though advertisers have pulled out of his program, the notion that he could disappear like Stern is one from another time — conservatism is the status quo and there’s always room for it now, particularly when it masquerades as information rather than entertainment.

After Megyn Kelly left Fox, Tucker Carlson took her spot, and if Carlson were removed, a new version of him would sprout in his place. This whack-a-mole quality to outrage jocks extends, more troublingly, to their politics — if they are not outraged about one thing, they will immediately find another. They are as adaptive as comedians like Stern, use facts as props to play journalists like Cronkite, and influence voting and policy just as seriously. As Jon Stewart scolded Carlson and his cohost in 2004 on the CNN show Crossfire: “You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate.” And without the FCC to shut them down for good, or at least out them as entertainers, the only hope is that their audience will realize that the most transgressive thing to do is to stop listening.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

The New Old Hollywood

Carlos Amaya / Sipa USA / AP, Charles Sykes / Invision/ AP, Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 8 minutes (2,147 words)

Some people missed Jack Nicholson at the Oscars this year. They were expecting to see the octogenarian — shades on — where he always is: front row, leaning back, just about sucking on a cigar. They expected the stars on stage to shout across the room at him and him to shout back, like the Dolby Theatre is his own personal living room. Because that’s how it is when you’ve been in the industry since you were teenager and you’ve been nominated for countless Oscars and you’ve won three — it’s age that bestows the privilege, but also work. Oh, and race. And gender too. Also sexuality. So, yes, with all those things squared away — whiteness, maleness, heteroness — in an industry that privileges all three, after several decades you acquire the kind of legendary status where you don’t stand on ceremony because everyone else is standing for you.

So where was Jack? I don’t know; I didn’t notice he was gone. How do you notice when Spike Lee’s in his spot? This guy who won a Student Academy Award back in the eighties, leaning back, side-eyeing everyone, shouting back and forth at everyone too. Just like Jack except, like, more. In his grape suit and his grape hat and his grape glasses, Lee peacocked the hell out of the red carpet with his fists up, Love and Hate forged across his fingers — were those rings or brass knuckles? Oh, wait, I remember, they’re from Do the Right Thing. They’re both. And then there’s those gold Air Jordans commissioned by the man himself for the filmmaker himself because, like Jack, he is also one of those basketball guys who sits in the front row of every game. Of course, the look — designer Ozwald Boateng, who worked on Black Panther, did the suit — is a lot more of a statement than Jack would ever make. But, then, Spike Lee is a lot more of a statement.

This is the new old Hollywood. Where Jack Nicholson was well-ensconced, now the seats of note are no longer occupied solely by the old white men who once claimed all the accolades for building the industry. Instead you have the people who have worked just as hard for just as long who are no longer being overlooked — more than that, they are being recognized as essential to the future. While Meryl Streep briefly appeared to take Nicholson’s spot, the aggressively decorated actress served as a bridge to the rarer, and therefore more powerful, recognition of the legacy of black artists — Spike Lee, Oprah, Cicely Tyson — not only for their own achievements coming up within a much less diverse industry, but for how they, like so many older people of color in so many other industries, have set the stage for the younger (second?) generation facing a less hostile world, built on the work of their predecessors.

* * *

It started with Oprah, because what doesn’t? Back in 1995, David Letterman launched the Oscars by walking across the stage to where the queen of daytime was sitting, and saying, “Oprah?” From the audience, in her regal chocolate gown, sprinkled with diamonds, even her wave regal, she mouthed, “Hi,” because that’s all you have to really say when you’re Oprah. She proceeded to laugh good-naturedly as he introduced her to Uma, but no one wants to remember that terrible punchline, and anyway, the point was Oprah. Only 10 years after launching her syndicated talk show — in a field saturated with white men — Oprah was a big enough name to open Hollywood’s biggest night of the year. But she was only 41 then, so: big enough, but not old enough to be the kind of legacy that just sits and watches as everyone orbits around her. That came later.

In the interim, Oprah was named the most influential woman in the world multiple times over. She became so pervasive in the culture — her show, her magazine, her cable network — that she became less of a person and more of an emotion. Her fame transcended race and gender and sexuality, even body. So when she was seated at an awards ceremony, even if she was there for no real reason, the feeling was: obviously, this entire edifice would crumble if Oprah weren’t here. And when she wasn’t there, she still was. Because Oprah is everywhere. So when E! News joked in 2017 that she was “probably the most-thanked person in Emmy history” it seemed fitting. As John Oliver said when he accepted the award for writing in a variety series, “I’d like to thank Oprah, because she is sitting right there and it seems inappropriate not to.”

Oprah herself thanked Sidney Poitier last year when she became the first black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award at the Golden Globes. “I remember his tie was white and of course, his skin was black. And I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that,” she said. “There are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given the same award.” Though she has been fully embraced by a white audience and industry, culminating in Globes host Seth Meyers joking of a possible Oprah presidential run in 2020 (it was less of a joke to the media, which covered the story incessantly) it is easy to overlook how she affected black artists. But two fellow giants of film and television — Tyler Perry and Shonda Rhimes — offered a reminder. Perry admitted that he started writing when Oprah said that it was a cathartic act on her talk show. And when Shonda Rhimes was honored at the Television Academy Hall of Fame ceremony in late 2017, her speech on Oprah mirrored Oprah’s on Poitier: “She was a black woman on television, and then she was a black woman taking over the world through television.”

With more young artists of color getting powerful faster, more older artists of color, many without Oprah’s platform (no one has that platform, to be honest), are lifted up along with them. As a guest editor for TIME’s second annual “Optimists” issue, filmmaker Ava Duvernay chose Cicely Tyson, who received an honorary Oscar in November, to be the cover star. “.@ava I have been asked multiple times what it feels like to be on the cover of @TIME?” the 94-year-old actress tweeted. “My humblest answer is, had u not been guest editor, I would probably never know.” Like dominoes, the inspiration tips down from one generation to another to another. Sidney Poitier inspires Oprah, Oprah inspires Shonda Rhimes, Shonda Rhimes inspires Issa Rae. And the recognition tips back up again.

Then there is the direct support provided by one generation to the next. In the interview accompanying his Rolling Stone cover last year, Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman revealed that Phylicia Rashad was once his acting teacher, but also helped him a whole lot more than that; she would feed him and drive him places and even got her friend Denzel to pay for him to attend a prestigious program in Oxford. And the support extends across ethnicities. Upon winning a SAG Award this year for her role in Killing Eve, Sandra Oh acknowledged three black actors for their encouragement throughout her career. “I want to thank Alfre Woodard. In 1997 — she’s never going to remember this — in 1997, she whispered in my ear, ‘I’m so proud of you out there. We fight the same fight,’” she said. “Jamie Foxx, in 2006, pulled me aside and he said, ‘Keep going,’ and in 2017, Lena Waithe, she just embraced me and said, ‘You already won. It’s in the work.’ So thank you to my fellow actors.” The fight is everyone’s, of course, and the solidarity across race, gender, sexuality, age — everything — is the real win.

* * *

“Spike Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” That’s how it sounds when one of your oldest friends announces that you’ve just won your first Oscar. Samuel L. Jackson was the one to read out the BlackkKlansman filmmaker’s name as the winner of best adapted screenplay. And Lee responded by jumping into his arms, wrapping his legs around Jackson so you couldn’t tell who was hugging whom. It was the celebration of a long-awaited formal welcome into the Hollywood family, the culmination of an almost 40-year career in which Lee had been trying to carve out a space as a commercial filmmaker. He always had the critical support (BAFTA, Palme d’Or, Cesar, Emmy, Peabody nods and wins) and the exposure (Malcolm X, He Got Game, 25th Hour, Inside Man) but the largely white establishment, symbolized by the Academy, had remained elusive until now.

Despite going from film school straight into the festival circuit, despite the popularity of his films — She’s Gotta Have It made about 70 times its budget — Lee had to hustle for himself because the industry wasn’t doing it for him. On the advent of his third film, Do the Right Thing, The New Yorker stated of Lee, “the most prominent black director in the American movie industry, he probably feels as if he were sprinting downcourt with no one to pass to and about five hundred towering white guys between him and the basket.” But some white gals were offering assists. Ahead of the Oscars, Kim Basinger’s off-script moment at the 1990 ceremony while presenting best-picture nominee Dead Poets Society went viral. In the clip she called out the Academy for “missing” Do the Right Thing, which she said told “the biggest truth of all.” Whether or not it was intentional, Barbra Streisand’s presentation of BlackKklansman as one of the best picture nominees this year echoed Basinger’s words. “It was so real, so funny and yet so horrifying because it was based on the truth,” Streisand said of the film. “And truth is especially precious these days.”

Even though BlackKklansman lost the Best Picture award to Green Book — “Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose,” Lee quipped (Driving Miss Daisy won in 1990, while Do the Right Thing wasn’t even nominated) — its director’s influence ricocheted across the ceremony. When Ruth E. Carter became the first black woman to win best costume design for Black Panther, she thanked Lee for her “start,” referring to her first gig on his second film, School Daze, in 1988. “I hope this makes you proud,” she said. The connection not only points to the limited opportunities for filmmakers of color — if Spike Lee didn’t hire you, likely no one did — but to Lee’s own ethos, to portray black society in all its complexity from within it. ‘‘A lot of black artists start off with a black base, and once they get big, they get co-opted and cut all ties to the black community,’’ he told The New York Times in 1986. He did not plan to do the same, nor has he. And a growing number of current artists of color — from Shonda Rhimes to Jordan Peele to Lena Waithe — are taking his cue and hiring as diversely. “Here’s the thing: Without April Reign, #OscarsSoWhite and the former President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences … I wouldn’t be here tonight,” Lee said after his Oscar win. “It’s more diverse … That would not have happened without #OscarsSoWhite and Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Facts.”

Though the most popular films have not improved their representation over the past decade, television is seeing increased diversity and these Oscars were the most inclusive in recent memory. Three out of the four acting trophies went to people of color, while two black women — Black Panther’s Carter for costume and Hannah Beachler for production design — made history in their categories. As Lee alluded to, this is only possible through changing optics, the slow trickle of diversity into the establishment that builds, generation upon generation, toward a welcome deluge. The result is a new and improved Hollywood that reflects reality over antediluvian ideals, in a world that is moving in the same direction — from politics, to science, to tech, to everything. And while it’s rare to catch the actual changing of the guard, Indiewire’s Eric Kohn managed to freeze a symbolic moment after the Oscars in which Spike Lee, trophy in hand, asked Black Panther director Ryan Coogler how old he was — 32 to his 61 — before saying, “Man! I’m passing it to you.” It was Lee acknowledging his own legacy in the direct presence of its heir. As he had said during his speech earlier in the night: “We all connect with our ancestors. We will have love and wisdom regained, we will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

At Risk, at Home and Abroad

Illustration by Lily Padula

Joy Notoma | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (3,079 words)

 

Akosua* was in my care when she was assaulted. A man entered the bedroom where she was sleeping and tried to undress her.

She called out, waking us around 3 a.m. Moments later, she appeared in our bedroom doorway hugging herself, a distraught expression on her 15-year-old face. Akosua was sleeping in the bedroom next to where my husband and I slept, in the house we were renting in Benin, a small country on the southern coast of West Africa.

“There was a man!” she stuttered through tears. “He came into my room. He tried to undress me,” she said.

I wanted it be a nightmare, but Akosua was an unlikely person to confuse reality so dramatically, and we would have taken her word for it anyway. She was the type of teenager who contemplated big issues about the world, who could hold her own in conversations about race and politics, who expressed emotions easily while still managing to be grounded. She was selfless in the way American parents sometimes wish their own kids were.

There was an exit door in the bedroom where she slept that I had carelessly neglected to lock, which made me culpable. I was overwhelmed by guilt.

The man who did it was the groundskeeper for the house we were renting, hired by the owner. People called him the security guard, but I never could. It made me feel like the house was a prison. What could he have actually protected us from anyway? His only valuable task which I could discern was yard work, so I called him the groundskeeper. And then it was he — the supposed security guard — who assaulted Akosua.

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Repairman-man-man-(wo)man

Utility worker installing cable
Jiangang Wang / Getty Images

At HuffPost, Lauren Hough recounts a decade of bizarre, bittersweet, and dangerous jobs she was assigned as one of the few women cable technicians in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Maybe next I had the woman with the bull mastiff named Otto. I don’t remember much about her because I like bull mastiffs with their giant stupid heads. I told her I needed to get to her basement. She said, “Do you really? It’s just it’s a mess.” (That’s never why.) I explained the signal behind her television was crap. The signal outside her house was great. With only one line going through the cinderblock wall, there was probably a splitter. She was taller than I am. That’s something I remember because, like I said, I’m tall. And probably a useful trait for her considering what I found next. I told her what I told everyone who balked about their privacy being invaded: “Unless you have a kid in a cage, I don’t fucking care.” Kids in cages were an unimaginable horror then. A good place to draw a line.

This is a good time to say, if you’re planning on growing massive quantities of marijuana, look, I respect it. But don’t use a $3 splitter from CVS when you run your own cable line. Sooner or later, you’ll have a cable tech in your basement. And you’ll feel the need to give them a freezer bag full of pot to relieve your paranoia. Which is appreciated, don’t get me wrong. Stoners, I adore you. I mean it. You never yell. I can ask to use your bathroom because you’re stoned. You never call in complaints. But maybe behind the television isn’t the most effective place to hide your bong when the cable guy’s coming over.

Anyway, Otto’s mom laughed and said, “Not a kid.” It took me a second. She went down to get his permission. And I was allowed down into a dungeon where she had a man in a cage. I don’t remember if she had a bad splitter. So that was probably early on. After a few years, not even a dungeon was interesting. Sex workers tip, though.

(Special thanks to late-nineties era Nickelodeon for the headline inspiration.)

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Kavitha Surana and Hannah Dreier, Garrett M. Graff, Dani Shapiro, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, and Lauren Hough.

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Earth to Congress

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Livia Gershon | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,149 words)

In recent weeks, protesters have swept across France, burning cars, evading tear gas-wielding riot police, and spraying graffiti across the Arc de Triomphe. Called the “yellow vest” protesters for the safety gear that French law requires drivers to carry, they have drawn much of their support from the countryside. They first mobilized in mid-November, in response to a gas tax hike equivalent to 25-cents-per gallon, which was scheduled to go into effect in January to combat climate change. After not very long, they succeeded in cancelling the tax increase. Since that victory, they have continued to stage rallies, taking on President Emmanuel Macron’s overall economic program, which includes shrinking social programs and rolling back labor protections.

In the United States, conservatives were quick to describe the protests as a repudiation of any and all efforts to address climate change. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris,” President Trump tweeted on December 8. “Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

There is, in reality, no reason to believe that anyone in France has chanted Trump’s name as part of the yellow vest movement. And protesters have not expressed opposition to the Paris Agreement as a whole—their official demands include adopting substantive ecological policy rather than “a few piecemeal fiscal measures,” as they wrote in a November 23 communiqué. Still, the protests point to a real danger for the most common approaches to environmental policy, which tend to involve tweaking private economic activity through taxes or regulations. Carbon taxes can be devastating to working-class people, especially outside big cities, if there’s no affordable alternative to gas-fueled cars. Rules limiting coal mining and oil drilling can wreak havoc on communities built on those industries if there are no other local sources of good jobs.

In the U.S., however, there is a chance to drastically cut carbon emissions and help the world transition to an ecologically stable path that accounts for labor interests: the Green New Deal, championed by incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement. The official proposal—really a plan to make a plan, by creating a select committee—won the support of 40 House members. Democratic leadership has watered down the committee’s mandate and rules, but high-profile support from senators like Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders suggest that the Green New Deal is likely to remain politically relevant in 2019 and beyond. The idea represents a rare bid to take on climate change with urgency and determination, reminiscent of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. Already, it has taken comprehensive climate policy—one that factors in working class people—out of the realm of fantasy (or street protest) and into the halls of Congress.

***

The Green New Deal is, at this theoretical stage, full of promises: to completely replace power production with renewable energy; to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation; and to retrofit every residential and industrial building in the country for energy efficiency—all within ten years. Ocasio-Cortez’s outline proposed the virtual elimination of poverty by creating good jobs for all Americans, with a particular focus on workers left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels and people who have been harmed by racial, regional, and gender-based inequality. For good measure, it suggested that the committee might “include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others.”

That’s an awful lot. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas, many of them far less radical than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, first popularized the phrase “Green New Deal” in 2007. He used it to describe a package of research, loan guarantees, carbon taxes, incentives, and regulations that he hoped would spur environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. President Obama adopted the idea as part of his electoral platform and the 2009 stimulus package, which expanded environmentally friendly infrastructure and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, though, the policy fell far short of putting the country on the road to zero emissions.

Since then, conversations about fighting global warming have typically focused on market-driven solutions, including incentives, subsidies, and, most common of all, some kind of carbon tax. The Democratic Party officially supported such a tax in its 2016 platform, and so do the minority of Republicans who are willing to acknowledge climate change as a threat. Some fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil, now say that they support one, too. “To me it’s a kind of smoke screen,” Matt Huber, a geography scholar at Syracuse University who has written about the potential for a Green New Deal, said. “It sort of suggests that this problem can be solved through market pricing, and I’m just not convinced that that’s the case.”

Ocasio-Cortez took up the cause as part of her primary campaign to defeat Joe Crowley, a moderate, from the left. The ambition of her Green New Deal proposal came in line with a report on global warming released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations. The report states that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade—the level necessary to reduce the risk of droughts, floods, and other disasters that would affect hundreds of millions of people—“would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

To reach that goal through a carbon tax, the IPCC suggests, the tax would need to be between $135 and $5,500 per ton by 2035. By comparison, the proposed hike that triggered the yellow vest protests would have brought the total carbon tax, at maximum, to the equivalent of about $100 per ton. It’s hard to imagine a tax even at the low end of the IPCC’s range proving politically palatable in most countries.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas.

Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped craft the green energy investment portion of Obama’s stimulus plan and has created green jobs plans for a number of states and countries, told me that a Green New Deal for the U.S. that aims to reduce the country’s emissions 50 percent by 2035 would probably cost 1.5 to two percent of GDP per year (though delaying investment could increase that cost). His approach would create 4.2 million jobs, he said, doing everything from building solar and wind installations to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. It would also shrink the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax and regulation, but workers in those fields would be able to find new, well-paid positions that are carbon neutral. “We need to incorporate the transition side, and it has to be serious,” he said. “We have to take care of the people who are going to be harmed.”

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal proposal promised to go further, including a job guarantee that would pay workers a living wage. It also made an overture to “deeply involve” labor unions in training and deploying workers. When Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank, modeled a plan with a similar scope, it projected the creation of ten million jobs over ten years.

***

Given the scale of a progressive vision for a Green New Deal, it’s worth looking at one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects ever: the mobilization for World War II. Federal spending jumped from under ten percent of GDP in 1939 to more than 40 percent in 1944. That’s a much bigger shift than any Green New Deal would bring, but active U.S. involvement in the war lasted only four years. Imagine the 2020s and 2030s as a less intense, more protracted battle against an existential climate threat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the U.S. would take up arms against the Nazis. But in 1939, that wasn’t at all clear. After Germany invaded Poland that year, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war, nearly half of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t get involved, even if the Allied Powers were losing. Even after France fell, 79 percent wanted to stay out of the war.

Like climate change deniers today, many opponents of World War II doubted the scope of the problem. Charles Lindbergh, celebrity pilot and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee, argued that a German victory was inevitable and that the Nazis really weren’t so bad anyway. (A 1938 survey found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the Nazi persecution of Jews was at least partly the fault of the Jews themselves.)

And, like the yellow vest protesters in France and the residents of U.S. towns facing the threat of economic disaster if coal and oil industries suddenly disappear, many Americans in 1939 worried about the economic cost of entering, at an unprecedented scale, a foreign fight. In July 1941, most Americans believed that the war would be followed by another great depression. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara has written that, when President Franklin Roosevelt ramped up military production to aid the Allies, the heads of large manufacturing corporations were hesitant to take on the contracts, as they worried about the increased taxes and federal power that would come with military programs. Some were also sympathetic to America First, or at least hesitant to pick a fight with the isolationists; many were reluctant to bet on the unstable demand from the war effort. “I don’t believe that manufacturers are anxious for war business,” Harvey Campbell, of the Detroit Board of Commerce, said in 1940. “They would rather see a steady line of production and employment.”

Labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal.

 

Labor leaders like Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, seized the moment to push for curbs on laissez faire capitalism, helping yoke private industry to a centralized economic plan. Most unions tied their fate to Roosevelt’s agenda, agreeing to no-strike pledges and putting their backs into the war effort. They were rewarded with perhaps the most labor-friendly economy in U.S. history. Unions went from representing fifteen percent of U.S. workers in 1937 to twenty-seven percent in 1945. The government capped corporate profits. Full employment, combined with government and union anti-discrimination programs, brought new opportunities for black and female workers. Employers eager to retain workers in the face of wartime wage freezes began offering pensions and health insurance.

We can’t go back to 1947, and most of us wouldn’t want to. The era brought segregated suburbs, anti-communist witch hunts against labor and civil rights organizers, and an environmentally disastrous dependence on cars. But the war, in combination with the New Deal that preceded it, established a stable economic order and, crucially, widespread faith in the federal government.

***

Today, labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal. Much of Pollin’s research, for example, has been commissioned by unions and their supporters. But the unions of 2018 are much smaller and less powerful than their counterparts of 1939, and no Democratic leader has anything like FDR’s popularity. Enacting a comprehensive plan to fight climate change, poverty, and inequality will require strong alliances. Such an effort must bring together environmental activists, communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries, and economic justice campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the teachers who mobilized across red states in 2017. It will also take collective action, like the sit-ins, which the Sunrise Movement has been holding at Democratic leadership offices.

It will also require more people to vote, in order to persuade the Democratic Party that this level of investment in economically responsible climate policy is a winning strategy. A minority of Americans voted in the 2018 midterms; working-class people and the young are particularly likely to sit out elections. But, Huber said, an agenda with the ambition of a Green New Deal might help bring more of the to the polls. “I’m a big believer that Democrats could do better just by turning out more working-class and poor people,” he told me. “As the Republicans know, the more people vote, the more they lose.”

The good news is, despite decades of anti-green rhetoric from fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians, environmental action is far more popular now than military action was in 1939. Nearly 70 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of Republicans—say that the U.S. should work with other nations to curb climate change, and 55 percent support the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

A Green New Deal—something on the scale of the Ocasio-Cortez outline, with systemic economic changes beyond subsidies and incentives—could utterly transform what comes after it, much as World War II did. It remains to be see what kind of change Congress can usher in.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston GlobeHuffPostAeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Reckoning With Georgia’s Increasing Suppression of Asian American Voters

Getty / Associated Press / Flickr CC / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Anjali Enjeti | Longreads | December 2018 | 18 minutes (4620 words)

 

Early on November 6, Election Day, Kavi Vu noticed that some voters appeared distressed as they exited Lucky Shoals Park Recreation Center, one of five polling places in Gwinnett County, Georgia. A volunteer with the nonprofit, nonpartisan civil rights organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Atlanta (“Advancing Justice”), Vu had been standing outside to answer questions about voting and offer her services as a Vietnamese translator.

When she began asking the mostly African American, Asian American and Latinx voters about their voting experiences, she learned that after 2.5 hour wait times, many of them had voted via provisional ballots.

Why? As it turned out, Lucky Shoals was not their correct voting location. “A lot of people had lived in Gwinnett County their entire lives and voted at the same location and all of the sudden they were switched up to new location,” Vu said.

So when poll workers offered voters the option of voting at Lucky Shoals with provisional ballots, rather than driving elsewhere to wait in another line, the voters took them up on it. They left with I’m a Georgia Voter stickers, and printed instructions for how to cure their ballots. But poll workers didn’t verbally explain to the voters that they’d need to appear at the county registrar’s office within three days to cure their ballots, nor did the poll workers make it clear that the votes would not count at all if the voters failed to do so. What’s more, as the day wore on, poll workers ran out of the provisional ballot instructions altogether.

Vu was alarmed. In an attempt to reduce the number of voters using provisional ballots, she began offering to help voters locate their correct polling place using the Secretary of State website. That’s when poll workers repeatedly began confronting her about her presence outside of the polling place. “They told me to stop speaking with voters in line, even after I explained what I was doing.”

By mid-afternoon, Vu counted some 100 voters who had wrongly reported to Lucky Shoals. When she finally left eight hours after arriving, she was “heartbroken,” over the dreadful conditions at the polling place and the number of votes by minority voters that would likely never be counted.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2018: Profiles

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

Sarah Smarsh
Journalist Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, and many other publications.
Smarsh’s first book, Heartland, was long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction.

William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump (Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker)

The intersection of class, race, and religion — what could be more fraught in these times? Cobb’s rare combination of quiet wisdom and a steady journalistic hand is the perfect guide. He profiles Protestant minister William Barber, the progressive activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, with thorough reporting and sensitivity, letting facts speak for themselves but humanizing the subject as no fact alone can do. I’ve been part of the Poor People’s Campaign at the ground level and was heartened to learn here that more than one respected source calls Barber “the real thing.” But, whether or not Barber is your political comrade, you will learn that he believes himself to be your spiritual brother — a refreshing fusion of political and moral force on the sometimes god-averse left.


Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Feature writer for The New York Times.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

This was a really good year for profiles, despite their death (reported annually). So good that it was very hard to narrow it down, and so I was very grateful that I couldn’t pick any from the New York Times, where I work, which really helped narrow it down. (Though you’ve just got to read this one.)

And how do you choose from the others: Dan Riley on Timothée Chalamet (though exactly which profile/article/photo/table of contents, even, under Jim Nelson wasn’t great?). Allison P. Davis’ Lena Dunham lede-ender of fallopian tubes like outstretched arms? Amanda Fortini opening Michelle Williams’ historically very locked vault. Emily Nussbaum on Ryan Murphy. Paige Williams on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wright Thompson on Geno Auriemma. Jessica Pressler on Anna Delvey. (Jessica Pressler on anything.) What a year.

But I finally picked one, and when I did, I realized it was a no-brainer. Lyz Lenz, who has terrifying amounts of talent, pulled off the neatest trick: A profile of screamy Tucker Carlson that walks the line of being way too self-referential, and yet somehow makes that work. It’s perhaps because it’s so funny. It’s perhaps because instead of looking for some fatuous lede scene it goes straight to the most prominent aspect of Carlson (why is he always screaming?). It’s perhaps because she knows that there is no end to the delight of knowing his full name: Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson. Or maybe it’s this section ender: “His publicist calls after our interview to make sure I know that Carlson is not a racist.” Whatever it is, I was very grateful for it.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram (Paige Williams, The New Yorker)

I lost count of how many times Paige Williams was obliged to deploy terms like “inaccurately,” “falsely,” “erroneous,” and “lie” in this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What’s remarkable about Trump’s press secretary though is that, at least here, those words are rarely used to describe statements by Sanders herself — but rather of those whose lies she must justify. It’s also what makes Sanders a cipher of our time. How does someone who vehemently claims to possess high moral character rationalize defending the indefensible? Put another way: How does one become that person? Williams’s search for an answer takes her to her subject’s native Arkansas, where in the ’90s the daughter of then governor Mike Huckabee “was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom” in the governor’s mansion, and Little Rock “residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes.” Later, during a visit with a lifelong friend, we catch a rare glimpse of the press secretary uncoiled and away from the podium, “wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls.” Details like these are certainly humanizing. But Williams isn’t here to vindicate Sanders’s transgressions. In 9,293 words she deftly dismantles the notion that the president’s “battering ram” might walk away from any of this with clean hands. “A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution,” Williams offers early in the piece. “But Sanders stayed.”


Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

Lyz Lenz’s profile of Tucker Carlson in the Columbia Journalism Review begins and ends with the subject shouting at the writer, but insisting that he’s not. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Carlson’s raison d’être in the Trump era: convincing people to believe lies despite proof of the truth sitting right friggin’ there in the form of scientific studies, sociological data, photographic evidence, and the like. And when gaslighting fails? To Lenz, hardy soul that she is, Carlson again demonstrates his favorite ripostes. He deflects probing questions with glib mockery, by rejecting a query’s value so that he doesn’t have to address it, or — my personal favorite — with pseudo-intellectual incoherence masquerading as the sort of wily argument that wins high-school debaters gleaming trophies. (This is a digression where I beg someone reading this list to pen the definitive essay on how debate is the root of political evil. I will tweet it every day, forever.) Lenz, wholly in control of her craft, injects the profile with her own anxiety and anger about Carlson’s bullshit and with sly reminders that, for too long, respectable media overlooked his bullshit because Carlson was quite good at mimicking Hunter S. Thompson. People keep wondering, wide-eyed, what happened to Tucker Carlson. They don’t want to admit that the answer is, and was always, right friggin’ there.


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffington Post Highline)

To Gerald “Jerry” Selbee, an “intellectually restless” dyslexic cereal box designer from Battle Creek Michigan, everything in the world was a puzzle to be solved. At age 64, Selbee’s mathematical mind discovered a loophole in the Michigan Lottery’s “Winfall” game. He figured he’d test his lottery strategy as something fun to do to in retirement. Jason Fagone wrote 11,000 words about how Jerry and Marge Selbee won $27 million gaming the Michigan Lottery over nine years and this piece has it all in a winning combination. As you root for the working man who finds a way to win against a big government entity, you too savor the thrill of solving a tough puzzle to make your lottery dream come true. This is longform at its finest.

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

Longreads Best of 2018: All of Our No. 1 Story Picks

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2018. Here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday. Read more…