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This Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion

John Keats reading a book of poetry, after portrait by Joseph Severn. English poet, 1795-1821. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Dear Reader,

I’m sitting here trying to write up my little “This Week in Books” list, and it’s a real problem, because the literary corona-articles I saved last week already seem… slight. As in, too small for the occasion; preposterously hedged with absurd little silver linings. Re-reading one article I’d saved for my list, I ended up having to ask myself, is it actually ok to conclude that the typhus scene in Jane Eyre demonstrates how pandemics can be beneficial unstructured time for children!? But this isn’t me being critical, ok, this is me saying: that Jane Eyre article is already 10 days old, and what’s happening now is, the exponential growth of the disaster has made all these corona-articles floating in its wake appear smaller and smaller at a similarly accelerated rate. Last week seems so tiny; last month is minuscule. I dare you to try reading anything from February about the coronavirus; it feels sort of like going insane!

The real problem with the literary corona genre, to be honest, is that as the days go by, and more “essential” workers sicken and die, I feel my interest in anything about corona not written by or about essential workers kind of fading. The travails of lockdown are real, of course, but the thing to keep in mind about lockdown is that it is safety. There’s only so much we can complain about this before we start to reveal something… unpleasant… about ourselves; before we begin to align ourselves with what’s being done to the “essential” working class in this country. The mass sacrifice. It’s like the government is sending soldiers into combat with no guns, or something; like the Battle of Stalingrad, but for no particular reason!? I saw a tweet by a garbage collector who said that a passerby yelled at him for wearing a mask because he doesn’t deserve it as much as a healthcare worker. I saw a tweet quoting a month-old Facebook post by a bus driver worrying that his job will endanger him, with an addendum that he has already died of the virus. I see photo after photo of “essential” workers with no masks or PPE of any kind and think to myself that this cannot possibly be okay. Two weeks ago, the FedEx guy was parked outside our apartment — and we were watching, because any time a truck or something pulls up in the street that’s entertainment for us now — when suddenly he screamed, and I mean really goddamn screamed, to no one and to every one of us who was peeking at him out our windows: “What are we even doing out here!!??” The silence that followed was profound.

Doctors and nurses need PPE desperately, but also, so does everyone who’s still at work! So demand not only that your governments provide PPE for your healthcare workers, but for your garbage collectors, too. Please!

That all being said, I’ve still got a few literary corona reads here for you. I’m not trying to, I don’t know, make a grand statement. Just a small statement. I’m voicing a concern — a tiny but exponentially growing concern — that in a couple weeks this will all seem insane. Read more…

On Racism and Epithets

Brian Ach/Invision for Spaulding/AP Images

One of the greatest features of the literary essay is its flexibility. An essay can be linear and chronological. It can be digressive and circular. The dots it connects can form a trapezoid whose structure remains hidden until the last sentence makes everything crystal clear. The best essays are, as essayist Phillip Lopate once said in a lecture, a map of the movement of a human mind, and part of an essay’s pleasure is seeing how different minds work.

For the New England Review, fiction write Robert Lopez explores racism’s vastness and influences, in both his life and the world at large. Ranging freely to collect seemingly divergent points, he connects elements from American culture with his past and present to create a brilliant, fresh portrait of racism and its lasting effects, using particular racial epithets to lead his way. We always need powerful perspectives on American racism. His is wildly original and affecting.

I used to describe myself as half Puerto Rican and half Italian and half Cuban and half Spanish. I called it the new math.

Of course it wasn’t true, those percentages. But saying one was a quarter or eighth or some other tiny fraction of anything always felt stupid to me.

Which is akin to being classified as a quadroon or octoroon, which was also ridiculous and awful.

During American slavery, quadroon was used to designate a person of one- quarter African ancestry, that is equivalent to one biracial parent and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of one African grandparent and three white or European grandparents.

Some terms for quadroons in Latin America are morisco or chino.

In the ’90s I worked at an Italian restaurant on Long Island as a waiter and, like in many restaurants in New York both then and now, Latinos staffed the kitchen. One such line cook was referred to as Chino. That’s what everyone called him and that’s what I called him. I have no idea what his given name was, perhaps it was Roberto or Jesus.

You can imagine why he was called Chino.

The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one pure black parent and one pure white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto. In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries.

The US Government used quadroon and octoroon, etc., as distinctions in laws regarding rights and restrictions.

The only math I did as a teenager was the calculation of batting averages and earned run averages, the probability of drawing to an inside straight, now known as a gut-shot straight, which you should never attempt.

Now the only math I do is by increments of 15. 15-love, 30-15, deuce.

My tennis community here in Brooklyn is diverse and glorious. In the past year I’ve played with Mexicans, Guatemalans, Haitians, Jamaicans, folks from Qatar, Egypt, Nigeria, all manner of Europeans, quite a few Australians and South Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Pakistani, even people from Ohio.

White, black, brown, color and off-color. All kinds of fractions.

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Albatross People

Arthur Morris / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Daileda | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (2,000 words)

My wife told me she had at last booked a flight back to Bengaluru and so I should relax that evening at our apartment. There I opened a book I was reading about birds, called The Thing With Feathers, by Noah Strycker. I was toward the end, on a chapter about albatrosses.

The wandering albatross looks not much different from a seagull, except it’s enormous. Its wings span 12 feet, twice my height. Wanderers need wings like this because they spend a huge part of their lives floating over the open ocean, plucking fish and squid from the water. They do this away from their mates, because keeping track of each other would cost precious energy needed to stay aloft. Each partner goes about their own life until, once every two years, they flutter back home to the little bits of land in the Southern oceans on which they nest. They greet each other with a dance and quickly go about building that year’s home. Though it takes nine months for an albatross chick to leave its nest, the parents won’t see each other much during that time, either. The baby needs food, and so they fly out in search of it over different parts of the sea. All that time away, and yet albatrosses almost always remain faithful for life.

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Some Inland California History Begins with an Orange

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

For Riverside native and author Susan Straight, citrus and camaraderie were once the ties that bound people in the part of southern California called the Inland Empire. This area includes the many cities east of greater Los Angeles, and west of Palm Springs, in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. New arrivals used to plant lemons, tangerines, and oranges in their yards, as well as figs, persimmons, avocados, and loquats, and they shared their bounty with friends and neighbors. For California’s public broadcasting service KCET, Straight writes an evocative essay that mixes regional history with personal history, and celebrates the way these imported fruits have shaped the social fabric and local economy. She has an 80 year old apricot tree growing on her property. Even though this arid region isn’t known for its timber, Straight calls its planted gardens “non-native woods” and sees them as paradise, because they helped provide many people what was truly a piece of the good life. “The groves are nearly gone now,” Straight writes, “housing tracts named for what they’ve erased.” But locals don’t give up these traditions.

Eliza Tibbets started the first two seedling navel orange trees. A statue of her was recently unveiled in downtown Riverside, and it seems a fitting time to remind ourselves of the woman who transformed California’s landscape, not just with daring but with generosity. (I still drive past the Parent Navel Orange Trees, at the corner of Arlington and Magnolia Avenues, every week.)

She was married three times, an abolitionist (her third husband, Mr. Tibbets, campaigned as a “Radical Republican” who tried integration in Virginia), a suffragist who tried to vote in 1871, a spiritualist who led séances in Riverside when she got here. But in 1873, she sent to Washington’s new Bureau of Agriculture for the first two seedling trees of a new variety of seedless oranges from Bahia, Brazil, and planted them in her yard in Riverside. She kept them alive with dishwater, shared the fruit and more cuttings, and changed the economy and the very look of Southern California. (Neither she, born in Cincinnati, or the seedlings, were natives.)

By 1886, entire towns like Rialto, Bloomington, Corona and Redlands were laid out around groves of Washington navel orange trees. Packing houses for Sunkist Growers and other cooperatives were built, the Santa Fe Railroad took boxcars full of fruit all over the nation, and oranges were shipped around the world. By 1895, Riverside had the highest per capita income in America, thanks to the citrus industry.

The faces of Southern California changed with citrus, too.  Chinese laborers, Italians and Mexicans and Japanese and African-American southerners, Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma and Texas and Colorado — all picked and packed and trucked oranges.  I grew up with their kids.

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In Hot Pursuit of STS-50, High Seas Scofflaw

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The high seas begin 370 km from a nation’s shore and because it’s difficult for governments and organizations to patrol and police these waters, it’s the perfect place for pilfering the best the ocean has to offer while damaging fish stocks and marine ecosystems. At Hakai Magazine, Sarah Tory reports on the hunt for STS-50 — alias Andrey Dolgov, alias Sea Breeze, alias Ayda — a notorious longliner whose captain and crew had evaded and escaped capture to loot the seas of $50 million in fish over a ten year period.

The STS-50 was a 452-tonne, 1980s-era former longliner originally from Japan. It was well known in maritime circles…for poaching Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish (also called Chilean sea bass), two lucrative cod species from the Southern Ocean. Authorities believe the STS-50 operated illegally for 10 years or so and looted up to $50-million worth of the fish, which can grow to 120 kilograms and live for 60 years. Interpol had issued a purple notice for the vessel—an international request for information about the STS-50’s criminal activity. But the vessel’s owners and captain had been evading authorities for years with a typical bag of tricks: registering the boat to nations with lax rules; using shell companies to obscure ownership; forging documents; and spoofing the most advanced satellite surveillance.

Vessels that fish illegally are often involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling while contributing to plummeting fish stocks and degraded marine ecosystems. Experts estimate that up to 20 percent of the world’s total catch (fish and other marine fauna) falls under illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. That’s more than 23 million tonnes of seafood stolen from the seas annually—or one out of every five wild-caught fish sold on the market—worth $23.5-billion.

Selling the illegally caught fish is relatively easy to get away with if port inspectors do a poor job of investigating the vessel, explains Peter Horn, the project director for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ ending illegal fishing program. All the captain has to do is misreport the catch, claiming for instance that the crew caught one type of fish when in fact it caught another; lie about the quantity of fish caught; or pretend to have fished in a different area. The end result is a market with so many illegally caught fish that “there’s a reasonable chance that you have inadvertently bought some,” Horn says.

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The Secret History of America’s Oldest Tofu Shop

Longreads Pick

Back before hippies and health nuts discovered cultured soy. Before Portland, Oregon gave the world the Gardenburger, a man from Okayama, Japan opened a tofu shop there in 1911. The United States was filled with racism and fear. But even after the Ohta family was released from WWII internment camps, Ota Tofu never stopped making their nigari-style tofu. It remains some of the best in the country.

Published: Sep 18, 2017
Length: 8 minutes (2,042 words)

The Poke Paradox

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Adam Skolnick | Longreads | February 2020 | 22 minutes (6,125 words)

I. The Poke Sampler

“When there’s a bowl of popcorn in the middle of the table, we think, I’m gonna eat two bites. Then we eat the whole bowl,” said Jennifer Bushman, founder of Route To Market and director of sustainability at the Bay Area seafood chain Pacific Catch. “That is human. That’s how we consume.”

Seconds later, we order the poke burger (among other things). Because of course we do.

Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Michael Barajas, Evan Ratliff, Andrew Mckirdy, Raffi Khatchadourian, and Agnes Callard.

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1. The Prison Inside Prison

Michael Barajas | Texas Observer | January 21, 2020 | 25 minutes (6,335 words)

Decades with no personal contact, no way back into the general prison population, cut off from the possibility of parole — solitary confinement is an ongoing experiment in cruelty on human subjects.

2. The Mysterious Lawyer X

Evan Ratliff | The California Sunday Magazine | January 16, 2020 | 48 minutes (12,100 words)

Nicola Gobbo defended Melbourne’s most notorious criminals at the height of a gangland war. They didn’t know she had a secret.

3. Throwaway Society: Rejecting a Life Consumed by Plastic

Andrew McMirdy | The Japan Times | January 10, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,465 words)

Japan is the second-biggest producer of plastic waste per capita, after the US. One journalist tries to spend a week without using single-use plastic and discovers how dependent Japan’s food system has become on disposable plastic.

4. N.K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds

Raffi Khatchadourian | The New Yorker | January 20, 2020 | 26 minutes (6,746 words)

In Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile, N.K. Jemisin recounts the racism she witnessed as a child in Alabama in the ’80s, as well as racism — editorial and otherwise — that she has lived through in her career.

5. Who Wants to Play the Status Game?

Agnes Callard | The Point | January 16, 2020 | 6 minutes (1,549 words)

Hi, nice to meet you, are we playing the Importance Game or the Leveling Game? With a skilled player, it’s hard to tell one from the other.

Throwaway Society: Rejecting a Life Consumed by Plastic

Longreads Pick

Japan is the second-biggest producer of plastic waste per capita, after the US. One journalist tries to spend a week without using single-use plastic and discovers how dependent Japan’s food system has become on disposable plastic.

Source: The Japan Times
Published: Jan 10, 2020
Length: 9 minutes (2,465 words)

The Price of Dominionist Theology

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Eve Ettinger | Longreads | January 2020 | 17 minutes (4,367 words)

Dave Ramsey comes into the building through the back door in the receiving room behind the store. He’s wearing a black turtleneck and a leather jacket and jeans, and he has security with him — several large men looking alert and formidable. I can smell his cologne behind him as he walks through the store. I take the back elevator up after him, to the third floor where his event is, and the elevator is suffocating with the bitingly bright cologne wafting off his body. I feel like I need to vomit.

I want to push past his security and confront him, to make him look me in the eyes and tell him how much he hurt me. I want to slap his face and eradicate the smile that follows me everywhere through the store today — on the signage for his event, on the covers of his books, in my memory from the hours of videos I’ve seen of him talking about how to not be “stoopid,” how to get out of debt quickly with a “snowball,” how to not be a “gazelle.” I want to break through the character of popular finance guru Dave Ramsey and make him see me, a fragile 24-year-old heartbroken about losing everything familiar in the space of a couple years — a loss that felt like it had snowballed directly from his teachings.

It’s like the story of the mouse and the cookie: Dave Ramsey and his mentor, Larry Burke, gave my father the idea that debt was sinful. Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible (Quiverfull theology), they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans myself, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap and the school gave me a good scholarship package. The school also didn’t allow students to take out federal student loans (given their conditional exemption from Title IX). Because I went to that college, I met my boyfriend, who had private student loans because his family was too rich for him to get a scholarship package. Because my boyfriend had student loans, my father tried to break us up. Because my father tried to break us up, we got married in a rush. Because we got married in a rush, his family gave us a wedding gift of paying for us to take Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class. Because we took that class and were shamed into agreeing with Ramsey’s teachings by our parents, we spent all our undesignated remaining funds after rent and bills paying off my ex-husband’s student loans and didn’t have any bills in my name because I didn’t have a credit score, and ate cheaply at home and lived in a shitty illegal basement apartment in DC with a former Nazi as our landlord. Because I didn’t have a credit score, when I needed to leave my husband, I couldn’t rent an apartment of my own, and because we’d been paying off his student loans, I didn’t have savings to buy my own a car to commute to work. Because… because because because.

And here I was: living in yet another a shitty, illegal apartment with two fraternity brothers in a sort of sleazy-and-more-impoverished New Girl setup in Los Angeles, divorced at 24, and working hourly wage jobs because the PTSD from my marriage was so bad, I couldn’t hold down the kind of salaried job I was actually qualified to hold. I was starving because I was broke, and I was slowly building up a credit score with a loan on a car (a relatively new car, because only a dealer would sell to someone with no credit history) and a tiny credit card that I was using to pay for my gas and groceries every week. My part-time retail job at Barnes & Noble meant that I was supposed to help facilitate Dave Ramsey’s book signing event that night at our store.

I felt lightheaded — hungry, angry, and panicked about being so close to this man whose legacy in my life had been a mindset of scarcity and fear for as long as I could remember.

Dave had $1,000 in cash that he was going to give away in a couple of chunks to the attendees. The money was tucked into white envelopes — symbolic of his famous “envelope system” for budgeting, based on the concept that handing over physical cash would be psychologically harder for people than swiping a credit card, thus leading them to reduce spending. My mom used that system for years, as did other homeschool or Quiverfull moms I knew. It was a sign that this person was like you. It was an in-joke within our community.

That night in the Barnes & Noble, Dave held the envelopes aloft, standing at the top of the escalators on the third floor of the store before a crowd that surged around all three levels, faces craning upward to look at him. He was glowing a little with sweat, light reflecting off his bald head and glasses. Everyone around me was dazzled, excited. Cash money lit a primal instinct in everyone around me, and for a moment I felt like I was in church during a revival. I half expected someone to fall to the floor, taken up by the Holy Spirit in the heat of the moment. I felt as if I was the only person in the building whose feet were still on the ground, who was unmoved by his waving cash in the air like a conductor casting a spell over an entire orchestra. Our regular store security was unmoved as well, and I caught the eye of my favorite guard — a kind, retired cop who had regularly rescued me from clingy young male customers begging me to change my mind and give them a date. He shook his head a little, a baffled grin on his face.

I don’t remember what Dave was saying to the crowd. I’ve heard his lines so many times that they all run together in my head now, vague and cliched, but the energy was biting. He was angry; restrained, but there was a sharpness to his speech that night which I had never picked up on before. He sounded to me like he despised the people who were there to hear him, and I wondered if I was imagining it. But when my friend the guard talked to me about it the following day, I discovered I wasn’t the only one. “He was pretty intense, wasn’t he?” he said.

“I hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t understand why he does gigs like that if he’s so rich and dislikes his followers so much.”

“Me either,” I said.
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