Search Results for: Mark Seal

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…

The Forever Nomad

Margarita Gokun Silver | Longreads | April 2018 | 18 minutes (4,386 words)

 

On an afternoon in August 2017, I walk out of the library and turn right. At the intersection, the pedestrian light comes on and I cross knowing that once I reach the end of Madrid’s Plaza de Colón, I’d wait less than a minute before I could cross again. I’ve done this walk every day for the past several years, my pace synchronized with the rhythm of traffic lights; my mind concentrated on counting the stairs — 14 of them: seven for my right foot to ascend and seven for my left — and my hand clutching a euro to give to the old man selling tissues on the corner. Everything is the same — skateboards banging against the concrete under the quick feet of their teen devotees, dogs running around the middle of the square let loose by their owners, and, up above, a giant red-and-yellow Spanish flag flying in the wind. Everything but one thing.

I’m on my way to a home that’s no longer there.

A week ago the movers came and methodically went through our three-bedroom apartment. They wrapped our glasses, plates, vases, and the ceramic Don Quixote in bubble wrap. They encased our furniture in cardboard, bending the thick corrugated boxes patiently so that when they were done our couch looked like a mummy-copy of its former self. They sealed our artwork — most of it painted by me — in wooden crates that resembled well-insulated tombs. I wanted to ask if the art could breathe through the layers of paper, plastic, and wood, nailed shut so tightly that not a ray of sunlight could get through. But they were busy, and I didn’t bother them. Instead I went into what used to be our bedroom, lay down on the bed that wasn’t coming with us, and concentrated on my own breathing.

By my count, this was the 18th time I moved homes. Some of those moves were miniscule — just several miles away from where I’d lived, my belongings riding in the back seat of a car in milk crates and an old laundry basket. Others were more substantial — intercontinental relocations that involved wrapped furniture, sea freight, and customs bills. What all of them had in common — and what set them apart from this last one — was that they didn’t evoke grief. Sure, many had been tinged with goodbyes and sadness, but none before had stopped my heart, gelled the blood inside of my veins, and perforated my body with holes that seemed to allow life to seep right out of it.

None of those moves had felt like loss.

Read more…

Here is My Heart

 

Megan Stielstra | An essay from the collection The Wrong Way To Save Your Life | Harper Perennial | August 2017 | 27 minutes (7,366 words)

 

This is the first in a three-part series on gun violence.

In part one, long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart.

In part two, Nicole Piasecki writes a letter to the wife of the shooter who killed her father.

In part three, Megan and Nicole talk about the shooting that changed their lives, who owns the story, and what to do with fear. 

 

* * *

Write your name here. Address, here. Here — check every box on this long list of disorders and diseases and conditions that are a part of your medical history, your parents’ medical history, your grandparents’ medical history and down the DNA. So much terrifying possibility. So much what if in our blood, our bones.

I checked two. Melanoma and —

“Heart disease?” my new doctor asked. I liked her immediately; her silver hair, her enviable shoes. Is that an appropriate thing to say to your doctor? I know we’re talking about my vagina but those heels are incredible. Later, I’d love her intelligence and, later still, her respect for my intelligence even when — especially when — I acted bonkers. She removed the weird, spotty growths from my arm and told me they weren’t cancer. She diagnosed my thyroid disorder and fought it like a dragon. She helped me understand my own body and demanded that I treat it with kindness, even when — especially when — I was stressed or exhausted or scared. It’s so easy to forget ourselves, to prioritize our own hearts second or tenth or not at all. Do you see yourself in that sentence? Are you, right this very moment, treating yourself less than? Cut that shit out, my doctor would say, except she’d say it in professional, even elegant doctorspeak and to her, I listen. Her, I trust. Every woman should have such an advocate and the fact that our patient/doctor relationship is a privilege as opposed to a right makes me want to set the walls on fire. Look up — see the wall in front of you? Imagine it in flames.

“Megan?” she said, and I pulled myself away from her shoes. “There’s a history of heart disease in your family?”

“Yes,” I said. “My dad.”
Read more…

The Strike: Chemicals, Cancer, and the Fight for Health Care

Ian Frisch| Longreads | April 2018 | 32 minutes (8,040 words)

When 59-year-old Jack Mack wandered from picket station to picket station to ask the Question, he tried as best he could to ease into the conversation. He didn’t want to scare anyone off. It was two months into the strike, and tensions were high. “You know, we handle some pretty nasty stuff in there,” he’d say. Or, if the guy was older: “C’mon, you’ve been here as long as I have! You know everyone!” Sometimes, if he already knew the person, he’d cut to the chase: “Wasn’t there a guy you worked with down there that was diagnosed with cancer a few years back? Did he make it through?” If they didn’t answer, staring instead at their steel-toed boots, Mack would lean in and say, “You know, I’m sure you heard, but I was diagnosed with cancer myself. Beat it, but — you know.” Then he’d turn toward the sprawling complex across the street — the site of the only job he’d ever had — and nod, adjusting the cap perched on his head. “Yup. Forty years.” He’d inhale deeply, nearly a sigh. “That’s a lot of hours around those chemicals.” He’d shake his head, unsure if he should blame himself or Momentive Performance Materials, the chemical plant in Waterford, New York, where he had dedicated so many years of his life.

Like Mack, many of the employees on the picket line had worked at Momentive for decades, and while they didn’t know for sure that working at the plant caused their cells to metastasize, the workers certainly knew of the inherent consequences that stemmed from handling carcinogenic chemicals on a day-to-day basis. That fear of a link is what troubled Mack and his cohort, and it’s why in November 2016, nearly 700 unionized workers at Momentive went on strike, protesting what they thought was an unfair contract — one that pushed for more expensive and restrictive health insurance for workers and the elimination of health care for retirees altogether, “many of whom,” according to leaflets handed out during the strike, “are suffering from job-related illnesses caused by exposure to dangerous chemicals.” For decades, the workers had mixed and churned chemicals in a variety of forms to produce an endless array of products, which included specialized goods such as F14 fluids and rubber stoppers on syringes along with items encountered on a day-to-day basis like exterior coatings for soft drink bottles and the rubber used to manufacture nipples for baby bottles.

Now, though, those same workers were walking out for the first time, and the union outfitted a defunct hot dog shack across from the plant into a headquarters. Nearly all of them had been picketing the plant’s nine entrances 24 hours a day, powering through snow squalls, huddling around burn barrels for warmth, trudging through slush puddles.

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Union strikers around a burn barrel outside Momentive’s Water Treatment Facility. (Jonno Rattman)

On the picket line, in rare close quarters with men who worked elsewhere in the massive plant, Mack learned his coworkers’ stories. He took a few minutes out of each day to ask strikers if they’d had cancer or knew anyone who did. Sometime after Christmas, Mack had started jotting down the names — current and retired, dead and alive.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers — spine, skin, stomach, and more. While these are cancers that do afflict men of a certain age—according to the American Cancer Society, one in nine men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer—the diagnoses outpace certain national averages. Brain cancer afflicts .006 percent of adult males, far below the roughly 2 percent of the strikers with throat cancer whom Mack surveyed. By mid-January, he had 85 names. Many of these men had worked in the plant for more than 20 years, which meant they’d tallied up decades of exposure to dangerous chemicals. (Of the scores of men on Mack’s list, I’ve independently confirmed the cancer diagnoses of two dozen, through interviews with either the men themselves or, in the case of 11 who died, with family and friends.) Mack himself had long known coworkers with cancer. To him and other employees, it was almost commonplace to know a guy who had been diagnosed. “Three other electricians I worked with in waste treatment also have cancer,” he told me. “Long-term exposure — in some of these buildings, there’s no way you can avoid that.” Mack, an electrician who works on the machines that process the plant’s chemical waste was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. His brother, who also works at the plant, was diagnosed with tongue cancer the next year. Their father, who worked at the plant for 36 years, died of cancer in 1994.

Mack’s oncologist, Dr. Kandasamy Perumal, who specializes in urology and has operated a practice in nearby Troy for 35 years, is no stranger to cases like his. “As time went on, more and more people came from that area with instances of malignancy, rather than Troy or Latham or other towns. My practice sees comparatively disproportionate numbers of tumors from people who live in Waterford and Mechanicville,” he said. “But do we know if they all worked at the plant? I don’t know for certain,” he added, explaining that his practice is not obligated to collect workplace information from patients. Momentive said that it was unaware of any chronic health problems among employees as a result of exposure to raw materials, and that their well-being is its highest priority. “The company takes all necessary actions to ensure strict adherence to all federal and state health guidelines,” said a Momentive spokesperson.

There were risks in taking on this kind of work, Mack knew. So did many of the men whose names were folded up in his pocket. But there had been some promise of security at Momentive, a belief that their jobs would take care of them — a good living, a secure retirement, health care. Today they’re not so sure. After the plant was acquired by a private equity firm in 2006, things took a dark turn. A decade of control by Wall Street brought pay cuts and a litany of increasingly rancorous labor disputes — culminating in the massive strike.

When I visited Momentive in January 2017, workers sat at the booths inside the hot dog shack wearing camouflage jackets, reading newspapers, drinking coffee, and eating hot dogs and stale pastries. One checked in picketers who, after nine weeks on the line, were eligible for unemployment. They were also paid $400 a week by the union. The 104-day walkout began November 2 and ended February 14, and during that time these men were constantly on edge, both about the security of their job but more importantly about the precariousness of the benefits they desperately relied upon. The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Bill Tullock, a 55-year-old senior advanced control operator, whose doctor had found a tumor in his throat during an endoscopy for acid reflux in 2015, maintains that he’d never have gotten the routine procedure that led to his cancer diagnosis without Momentive’s old health insurance. At the time, his annual deductible was $500; now it’s $3,500. Tullock doesn’t solely blame the plant for his cancer, but he’s adamant that were it not for the generous coverage, he’d never have known he was sick.

“I dodged a bullet,” Tullock said of his battle with cancer, which, thanks to the low deductible he paid courtesy of his previous health care coverage, was caught early. “With the new insurance, I am pretty confident I would’ve never had the endoscopy, and would’ve never known there was a tumor. Then it would’ve spread, and I wouldn’t have known.” Under the new contract, once he retires, he’s on his own. “I dedicated myself to this place,” he said during the strike in January, sitting in the basement of the hot dog shack, holding back tears. “I should have never started working here. And now they are trying to give us this shit insurance and just — what, ‘Go die?’” He rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. “Our health insurance is like the final firewall of personal protection,” he said. “It’s all we’ve got.”

Tullock

Bill Tullock was told by his doctor to get an endoscopy in 2015; it turned out he had a tumor in his stomach. Jack Mack sits down with his list of sick workers while on a break at union headquarters. (Jonno Rattman)

The men who’ve worked at the plant for decades and battled cancer — whether they think it’s from the chemicals they handled or not — now face a task familiar to millions, one from which they thought they had a reprieve: They must either sign up for the company’s onerous coverage or fend for themselves to get health insurance, with costs varying widely through the complicated, cumbersome public exchange overseen by the government — the precariousness of which is compounded by the Trump administration’s promise to gut the Affordable Care Act, leaving workers in an even more fretful state of uncertainty.

Like so many Americans, they’re threatened by a toxic triumvirate of lax chemical-safety regulations, costly health coverage, and growing pressures on Wall Street to perform — the latter of which has forced businesses to perform under expectations that set them up to fail, with employees taking the brunt of the downfall

The decade of private equity ownership had gradually worn down a generation of workers, stoking a divide between those who would be taken care of and those who would go without. “Sacrifices were made with the expectation that we would get adequate health care when we retired,” Mack said. “If you are going to work in environments like this, you are going to need affordable health care.” The strike marked dividing lines between worker and owner and financier, but it also revealed a rift so deep that it was often left unspoken: What do American workers owe to one another?

***

Waterford, New York, is one of a cluster of manufacturing towns situated north of Albany, where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson. It blossomed into a factory hub as early as the mid-1800s and was known for its paper mills. A reported stop on the Underground Railroad, it was even visited by Alexander Hamilton and Frederick Douglass. Drive into town from across the Hudson and you’re greeted by a memorial to Waterford’s veterans, including men who fought in the Revolutionary War. Keep driving north on Route 4, past the village center, and the Momentive complex flanks both sides of the road, sprawling across an 800-acre plot.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York.

The town greeting in Waterford, New York. (Jonno Rattman)

The chemical plant is one of Saratoga County’s largest employers. First built by General Electric in 1947, it anchors the region both economically and culturally. For decades, the plant with its hundreds of union jobs offered its primarily male workforce a stable, middle-class kind of prosperity, one where high school graduates could eventually earn a six-figure salary. There was a sense of local pride: The soles of the boots in which Neil Armstrong took his one small step were made of silicone rubber manufactured here. “If you’re from here, this is where you work,” said Vinny Anatriello, a third-generation employee. “And if you don’t work here, you work in the school where all the guys’ kids go to, or you work in the doctor’s office where the guy’s sick wife goes, or you work in the grocery store.”

It’s no secret to the workers that materials used in Momentive’s Waterford plant can be dangerous. It’s been this way for decades. The plant sources silicone ore and, through reactions with various chemicals, produces materials used in consumer products ranging from shampoo and medical equipment to caulking and car parts. Numerous longtime workers say that the current operations use dozens of toxic chemicals, among them benzene, lead, mercury, and hydrochloric acid. The waste it has produced over the years — over 11.4 million pounds in 2015 alone — has at times included more than three dozen toxic chemicals, 11 of which are carcinogens, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

There used to be even more, workers say, decades ago when GE owned the plant. Numerous workers said that until the early 1980s, they cleaned their winter coats with pure trichlorethylene, now a known carcinogen, and used fiberglass and lead as fillers in chemical mixtures. For some processes, they weighed out raw lead by hand. “Back then we’d scoop it like it was salt,” said George LaMarche, 65, who retired in July 2017 after 44 years at the plant and whose doctor is closely monitoring his elevated prostate-specific antigen levels — potentially an early sign of prostate cancer. “We never wore any protection for that.” In a statement, a Momentive spokesperson said that the company provides all its employees with protective equipment, extensive training, and instructions in how to properly handle the materials they work with: “When employees act in accordance with the policies and procedures Momentive has in place, potential risks are mitigated.”

Millions of American workers are exposed to carcinogens, or possible carcinogens, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that researches and investigates workplace safety and health. In 2012 alone, upward of 45,000 diagnosed cases of cancer — and, since the agency is still investigating and uncovering potentially carcinogenic materials used by the American worker, perhaps twice that many — were caused by past workplace exposure. On average, nearly eight times as many people die each year of diseases acquired on the job as die from injuries sustained on the job.

He kept the handwritten list folded up in his jacket pocket, adding new sheets as he collected new stories: six pancreatic cancers, seven bladder cancers, nine brain cancers, 11 throat cancers, 18 prostate cancers.

Since 1976, federal law has required all new industrial chemicals to be submitted for review by the Environmental Protection Agency. (Tens of thousands of industrial chemicals already in use were grandfathered in.) But after that initial environmental review, many industrial chemicals — which don’t necessarily have to get tested before being used in manufacturing — may never get a closer look by regulators. Once chemicals have entered the market, U.S. law only requires the EPA to collect data on the roughly 3,700 of them that are used at a rate of at least 500 tons per year. The data collected pertain mainly to their effects on the environment or the consumers of the products they produce — not on the workers who handle them.

“These chemicals are never sent back with actual information from the workplace,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s health program. “The regulations are focused on the end of the pipeline. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle at that point. People are already affected.”

Updates to the Toxic Substances Control Act, which was amended by Congress in 2016, mandated more pre-market testing for new chemicals seeking federal approval and required the EPA to review already-approved chemicals in widespread use. Ten of the most toxic of those are slated to be tested in 2018, but it’s unclear whether that deadline will be met. (Two of the chemicals have been commonly used at Momentive.) Since then, however, President Donald Trump has promised to scale back regulations broadly and has targeted federal agencies, the EPA chief among them, for sharp funding cuts.

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Momentive Performance Materials, a chemical plant in Waterford, New York (Jonno Rattman)

In May 2017, Nancy Beck, a former industry advocate and executive at the American Chemistry Council (of which Momentive is a member), was selected to become the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA unit tasked with implementing the updates to the toxic-chemicals law. Just two months earlier, she had gone before a Senate subcommittee as a then-executive at the ACC to push back against the review process. According to an investigation by Eric Lipton at The New York Times, the EPA has spearheaded “a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.” This included reevaluating plans to ban certain uses of two chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride and trichloroethylene, both of which have been used by Momentive employees.

Regardless of these policy reversals, tens of thousands of chemicals that have been in production for decades still need review. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental-advocacy group, estimated in 2015 that it could take 50 years to reevaluate 1,000 of the most toxic chemicals on the market. “Most toxins have not been adequately studied, employees have no tools to act on their suspicions, the companies have a disincentive to learn the full truth about what its chemicals do in terms of health impact, and the government is underfunded and doesn’t have sufficient tools to fully investigate,” said Dr. Steven Markowitz, director of the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College. “It’s a recipe for making the health consequences of working with toxic chemicals invisible.”

***

Tim Larson is a tall, broad-shouldered man who wears a musty cap tossed on his head. When I met him during the strike, he carried a megaphone that he used to shout chants on the picket line. His face lit up when he screamed, and his eyes — which seemed to hang out of his skull — bulged even further from their sockets. I stood with Larson most nights while I was there — he held the late shift on the picket line — and he explained that the plant is a complex of various buildings, each housing in a different part of the production line. You’re either breaking down raw ore, reacting the rock with chemicals, mixing together intermediate materials, packing products, or organizing them for storage and shipment.

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Tim Larson steps off a bus before a protest in Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s neighborhood in Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

Larson, a chemical operator, began working at Momentive in 1988 when he was 35 years old. He told me stories about the different parts of the plant, including Building 78. This area of the massive plant is home to the Waterford plant’s fluorosilicone manufacturing operations. There, a silicone base is reacted in roughly 100-gallon “dough” mixers at more than 240 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fluorosilicone gum for use in automobile gaskets and aerospace products. (The mixers are also used to produce “intermediates,” which are unfinished products that passed from building to building within the plant, and included different grades of polymers and fluids.) Long-term exposure to seven chemicals used in Building 78, according to Momentive material-safety data sheets, are suspected of or known to be reproductive toxins. Another chemical, Tris(2-chloroethyl) phosphite, is a carcinogen. Workers call the building the One-Nut Club, for reasons that to them seem less ominous than inevitable.

When GE owned the plant, risks from fluorosilicone production had been on the company’s radar since the 1970s. In a “strictly private” 1977 safety audit, a safety specialist said that research had shown that materials created by these processes, when ingested — which could mean breathing in the chemical or having it touch one’s skin — shrank rats’ prostates and testes “and may have similar effects in man.” The specialist also wrote that tests showed that the chemical compound handled by workers was “probably not a carcinogen.” GE performed a similar toxicity review 20 years after its initial testing and analyzed several chemicals used to the produce fluorosilicones. “The data, although not definitive, did not give rise to any concerns over the potential for carcinogenicity,” the report concluded.

“Nobody admits there is a correlation, but we put stickers on the tanks that hold this stuff, saying that it causes cancer,” Larson told me, referring to the warning stickers that California state law required them to affix. (Many of their products are shipped to the Golden State.) “It’s right there in front of you.” 

“After six years, my eyes started bulging out of my head,” he told me, pointing to his face. He was diagnosed in early 1996 with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid. “I had to get my eyelids sliced, because I couldn’t close my eyes,” Larson said. He knows he can’t prove a direct link, he added, but he is “convinced that all my autoimmune problems are directly related to working here.” Soon after his diagnosis, Larson transferred to another area of the plant.

The men were on strike for many reasons, but high-quality, affordable health care was their main concern. It was what they needed most.

Other workers voiced their concerns about Building 78. In 1998, a GE-employed research chemist named Herman Krabbenhoft wrote a letter to two operators who worked there, Joe DeVito and Dan Patregnani, explaining that the previous year he had expressed concerns to managers about the vapors released during fluorosilicone operations. Krabbenhoft wrote that GE’s health and safety manager was supposed to have initiated a study of how to measure the vapors’ concentration, but that after a year nothing had been done, adding that he was told by a colleague to “back off on pushing this because it might affect how GE’s managers viewed me and my performance.”

“Herman was on our side,” DeVito said.“He said, ‘Stay away from it. It’s going to kill you.’” Shortly thereafter, DeVito said, Krabbenhoft was fired. (Multiple attempts to reach Krabbenhoft for comment were unsuccessful; GE declined to comment for this article, referring all questions to the plant’s current ownership, who also declined to comment on the specific incident.)

The building’s ventilation system was updated in the early 2000s, multiple employees who worked there said. The system was supposed to be air and temperature controlled. “It never worked, never sealed the room properly,” said John Ryan, who worked in Building 78 at the time, adding that temperatures could reach 110 degrees in the building due to the faulty system. In 2005, Ryan said he filed a formal grievance, asking to spend less time near the mixer, explaining that he didn’t want to be exposed to the hazardous mixture and its vapors. “But nothing changed,” he said. “And they never fixed the dough mixer either. Materials would come out into the air or spill onto the ground. That’s still going on, until this day.” In mid-2017, Momentive installed a second dough mixer to Building 78 to ramp up production, and though the machine suffered at first from issues relating to its packing seal, there haven’t been any recent health-related complaints. (Both the venting system and the initial dough mixer have also been serviced and are reportedly in working condition.)

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Joe DeVito was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2013. He worked in Building 78. (Jonno Rattman)

Now, DeVito said, workers must wear full-face respirators when they clean the mixers, which have to be pristine before the machine can be used to produce another product. The fluorosilicone is so sticky, Larson claimed, that he used to have to climb into the 100-gallon drum and scrape off any lingering substance with a razor blade. “Fluorosilicone is a highly resistant chemical — oil, water, you name it,” he said. “That’s why it is used on gaskets and car bumpers, or in rocket ships.” According to DeVito, “Momentive took more steps for safety over the years,” but the process itself and the chemicals used in it remained the same. Additionally, the company’s material-safety data sheets do not indicate whether the vapors produced from these chemicals are hazardous to humans, despite there being a warning that TFPA vapors, which are highly toxic, may evolve from the products used to make fluorosilicone gums and polymers. “The company raised certain health issues related to the chemicals used in this building, but despite a very incomplete knowledge base, they draw the conclusion that there is no cause for concern,” said Dr. Markowitz of Queens College, who reviewed the documents. “My conclusion would’ve been: ‘There’s a big gap in what we know versus what we don’t know.’ That’s the proper conclusion.”

DeVito was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer in 2013, after a bump on his neck swelled to the size of a golf ball. DeVito told me he knows of five other control operators who worked in Building 78 who were diagnosed with cancer. He told his doctor about his decades of exposure to fluorosilicone vapors. “She said, ‘It would take years to prove that it happened from work,’” he explained. “‘Take care of this and just move on.’” His treatment, radiation, and chemotherapy, were successful. He retired in early 2018.

Some workers, like Tony Pignatelli, who worked in the plant for 34 years, weren’t so lucky. Pignatelli was diagnosed with brain cancer in January 2000 and passed away three weeks later. “My dad knew the risks, but he did it because they took care of them with good pay and health care,” his daughter said. “But I can’t even begin to understand what those guys are going through down there now with this new contract.”

***

Employees accepted the risks associated with working in the plant, the backbone of their community, for over half a century. They felt taken care of: stable pay, a sizable pension, affordable and quality health care, good communication with management, camaraderie with fellow workers. But that all changed when GE sold its global silicone operation, with the Waterford plant as its centerpiece, to a Wall Street investment firm in 2006 in a leveraged buyout. “When it was GE, they treated you like family,” Jack Mack said. “After the sale, everything changed.”

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Matthew, Kenny and Vinny Annatriello—father, nephew, and son—on the picket line. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that manages $249 billion in assets, bought a controlling stake for $3.8 billion, then saddled the corporation (which changed its name to Momentive Performance Materials in December 2006) with $3 billion in financing debt while it collected a $3.5 million that first year for “financial and strategic advisory services.”

Many employees didn’t understand the implications of the sale until 2009, when nearly 400 production workers received surprise pay cuts. Brian Cameron Jr., a 34-year-old second-generation employee, was making $27 an hour as a chemical operator. He had just bought a house in Waterford and a new Dodge Ram pickup the previous summer. “Everything was going good. I paid my bills,” he said. “I thought I was set for life.” Then his wages were slashed to $17 an hour. He eventually took a higher-paying position at the plant, but his debt piled up too fast. “I thought if I moved quickly, I would be able to save my life,” he said. “But it was too late.” He lost his house, gave back his truck, and moved into a coworker’s apartment.

The cuts meant that his coworker Ron Gardner, then 53, and his wife, Donna, could no longer afford the $1,300 monthly payments on their two-bedroom ranch home in Grangerville. “We were struggling,” he said. A few years later, in 2013, they abandoned it and moved into a trailer park in Saratoga Springs, just two miles from Momentive’s current CEO Jack Boss’s $950,000, 4,375-square-foot home. They took out personal loans to pay for a $23,000 double-wide, then used savings and loans from family members to pay for the roof and the lot’s rental fees. Unable to sell their ranch, they filed for bankruptcy and began paying off their new debts.

The local union contested the wage cuts, and 18 months later, in 2010, with their contract soon to expire, Momentive agreed to settle by issuing back pay — more than $50,000 before taxes for some workers — while making the wage cuts permanent going forward. Gardner, Cameron, and others who had lost their homes or been pushed into bankruptcy by the cuts couldn’t turn down the chance to repay their debts. “People were so broke from the wage cuts, they voted yes for that contract,” said local union president Dominick Patrignani, who has worked at the plant for over 30 years and was the chief bargainer during last year’s strike. “They were given no alternative.”

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Ron and Donna Gardner lost their home, then Ron developed esophageal cancer. Dominick Patrignani, president of the local union, is the chief bargainer for the 700 strikers. (Jonno Rattman)

But Momentive wasn’t done. In 2013, the company froze pensions for workers under 50 and those with less than 10 years of service. “Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family,” Cameron told me during the strike. All of this is par for the course for private equity firms like Apollo. According to a study led by Josh Lerner, professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School, private equity buyouts lead to sizable reductions in earnings per worker compared with traditional companies, as well as modestly greater job loss, with a comparative decline of 4 percent over a two-year period.

“If a private equity firm needs to goose their returns, they will take it out of worker’s compensation — wages, pensions, benefits, all of it,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the co-author of Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street. To her, private equity firms only care about one thing: profit. “The fastest and easiest and least controversial way, in their point of view, is to cut compensation. They make a dollar every time they take a dollar out of workers’ compensation,” she said. “Private equity controls management and the board of directors. They can fire anyone at any time. They sit at both sides of the table. There is no one looking out for the workers.”

In 2014, still under Apollo management, Momentive filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, trimming its debt obligations from $3.2 billion to $1.2 billion. This is also a familiar tactic for the firm. “It makes sense [Apollo did that] because you create money out of thin air,” said Tony Casey, professor of law at the University of Chicago, who studied the Momentive bankruptcy case. “Apollo is an aggressive investment firm,” he added. “They are not shy when it comes to using bankruptcy to their advantage.” The company announced a public offering three years after it emerged from bankruptcy, but the offering was postponed. When it did, Apollo owned the largest stake of shares.

Taking advantage of bankruptcy courts is also a preferred method of President Trump, who counts Apollo CEO Leon Black as a friend. And while Trump boasts about his dedication to the American worker, the company he keeps deliberately erodes the foundation upon which the middle class is built. In a 2011 interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, Trump said: “If you look at our great businesspeople today — Carl Icahn, Henry Kravis, Leon Black of Apollo — all of them have done the same. They use and we use the laws of this country, the bankruptcy laws, because we’ll buy a company. We’ll have the company. We’ll throw it into a chapter. We’ll negotiate with the banks. We’ll make a fantastic deal. … You know, it’s like on The Apprentice. It’s not personal. It’s just business. OK?”

“Every contract, they slashed benefits and made it harder for me to do what my father did: provide for his family.”

During Momentive’s bankruptcy proceedings, GSO Capital Partners, the credit arm of Blackstone Group, one of America’s largest hedge funds — headed by Steve Schwarzman, who chaired President Trump’s defunct Strategic and Policy Forum — translated its bond investment in Momentive into public stocks, a 6.8 percent stake. (A spokesman for Blackstone said the firm sold its stake in Momentive on August 3, 2016 — the same day union workers voted to strike if a contract agreement could not be reached. The spokesman, however, could not provide documentation of the sale. The spokesman also confirmed that Blackstone senior adviser John Dionne is still on Momentive’s board of directors.)

In 2013, Blackstone had bought a 20 percent controlling stake in another longtime upstate New York employer, then-declining Eastman Kodak, which had already slashed retiree health care benefits and pensions (though the company did restore elements of its pension plan upon emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in late 2013). When Carl Icahn, the recently ousted special adviser to the president on regulatory reform — whom Trump also counts as a close friend — came to Trump’s rescue and retained full control of his Taj Mahal casino through a bankruptcy proceeding, he shut down the operation rather than give the union employees better health benefits. Roughly 3,000 people lost their jobs. “It’s a classic take-the-money-and-run — Icahn takes hundreds of millions of dollars out of Atlantic City and then announces he is closing up shop,” Bob McDevitt, the president of the local union, said in a statement after the closing.

Others in Trump’s family and inner circle have deep ties with these Wall Street operators, whose business tactics, like those being implemented in Waterford, affect middle-class families. Blackstone has loaned Kushner Companies, the real estate empire of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, more than $400 million for real estate deals since 2013. The firm is one of the company’s largest lenders. Two months ago, the New York Times reported that Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo, met with Kushner several times in 2017, at one point even discussing a possible job opening in the White House; by November of last year, Apollo would lend $184 million to Kushner Companies. (While Kushner is no longer CEO of the real estate company and has sold a chunk of his stake, he still reportedly holds properties and other interests in Kushner Companies — those investments are worth upward of three-quarters of $1 billion.) Kushner Companies is also on the clock to pay the $1.2 billion mortgage debt for 666 Fifth Avenue, a 41-story albatross in Manhattan that the company purchased in 2006, which is due February 2019.

Jack Boss joined Momentive as an executive vice president in March 2014, one month before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and he officially became CEO that December. The union believes that Apollo brought in Boss specifically to weaken the union during the next contract negotiation, which was slated for 2016. “They planned this entire thing,” Dominick Patrignani, the local union president, told me. “They knew what they were doing.”

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Dan Patregnani, a union member who worked in Building 78, and the headquarters of Apollo Global Management at 9 West 57th Street in. New York City. (Jonno Rattman)

In mid-January 2017, workers rallied outside the midtown Manhattan headquarters of Apollo Global Management, the private equity firm that had bought their company more than a decade prior. About a month later, members of their parent union, the Communications Workers of America, also handed out leaflets near the White House as President Trump met with Schwarzman, whom he had named an economic adviser and head of the Strategic and Policy Forum during the early days of the strike. (The 16-member group would disband just months after this meeting.)

Jack Mack, the second-generation worker who compiled the list of employees with cancer, trekked down to New York City to participate in the demonstration outside Apollo HQ. He stood with dozens of other workers and supporters, and his hot breath crusted in the frigid air as he called out Leon Black by name. This was the first time I met Mack — the strike had just begun. As the event came to an end and the NYPD began to shuffle protesters off the street, I asked Mack what he planned to do next.

He looked me in the eye and said, “Go back up to the plant and stand out there until this whole thing comes to an end — until we get what we deserve.”

***

The labor negotiations broke down over the summer of 2016, and by August a strike seemed imminent. In early September, 85 percent of workers rejected an offer that would have forced current employees into more expensive health insurance plans and eliminated the much-beloved benefit for future retirees altogether. They officially went on strike November 2. Five days later they voted again, with the same result — they rejected the offer by a larger margin.

Ron Gardner retired on New Year’s Day 2015. He was 61. He’d already lost his home and moved into his trailer, and he’d spent much of the previous summer at Saratoga’s venerable racetrack, watching and sometimes betting on the races. “I won enough to keep going the entire season,” he said, seated at his dining room table, television game shows audible in the background. Soon after he retired, he changed his health insurance on Momentive’s recommendation, switching providers and opting for a plan that was cheaper from month to month but caused his deductible to rise from zero to $3,500. He wasn’t worried. “I had never been sick a day in my life,” he said. But shortly before he retired, right around Thanksgiving 2015, he began having trouble swallowing. “It scared me,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even swallow my own spit.” There was a nearly two-inch tumor in his esophagus: adenocarcinoma, a form of cancer.

Gardner had begun working at GE’s Schenectady plant in 1973 and transferred in 1988 to Waterford, where he held various positions over the years, including the production of chemical mixers for caulking After GE sold the plant in 2006, he worked for more than two years refining chemicals in Building 30, filtering out cloudy imperfections before transferring those same liquids into drums to be sold to consumers. “I often inhaled a lot of vapors,” he said.

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The water treatment facility at Momentive Performance Materials. (Jonno Rattman)

Gloves, Gardner said, weren’t required for the job. According to material-safety data sheets, gloves are required only if a risk assessment deems them necessary. “He would come home covered in this caulking shit, all over his clothes and his hands,” his wife, Donna, said. “It would be everywhere.”

He transferred five years later to wastewater treatment, where he ran presses that compacted hazardous waste into dry, disposable cakes the size of kitchen tables before dropping them into trailers for disposal. He had to clean up spilled waste by hand and scrape out the presses if the cakes didn’t fall properly. The plant, he added, didn’t require respiratory protection for that particular job. “I breathed that stuff in for three and a half years,” he said. By the time Gardner began his last job at Momentive, the white walls of the facility had long turned gray from the dust produced by the waste. “That’s where I think I got the cancer from.”

Starting in January 2016, Gardner began a six-week course of chemotherapy and a month of radiation, paying off the $3,500 deductible in installments. Despite the treatment’s apparent success, Gardner’s doctor pressed him to undergo an esophagectomy. The operation — which would remove part of his esophagus and reconstruct it with the upper portion of his stomach — would be risky, and one of his lungs would have to be temporarily deflated during the procedure. Gardner decided against it.

By October 27, 2016, his cancer had returned. He needed the surgery to survive. But now he was racing against two clocks: the cancer and the company. Labor negotiations had broken down months before; the strike would begin within a week, and his current insurance coverage would run out at the end of December. “Company-paid medical, dental, vision, and drug coverage will not extend for the duration of employee strike activity,” a letter to employees from Momentive said.

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.” He called his lawyer and had his will updated. He went into surgery on November 29, and spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. “I wish I could’ve been out there on the picket line,” he said. “It was all such bad timing.”

Once home, Gardner was told by Momentive to sign himself and Donna up for new health insurance through Mercer, a private online benefits marketplace, where employees can choose from a variety of providers and plans. A 2014 Aon Hewitt survey found that despite accounting for only 5 percent of current plans, 33 percent of employers said they would begin offering insurance through private marketplaces in the next three to five years. In a 2016 report, Mike Gaal of Bloomberg BNA wrote that large employers pitch private exchanges to employees as a way for them to “buy down” to more appropriate levels of coverage. “While this may be true,” he wrote, “the reality is that the plan savings, in this example, are derived through shifting costs to employees through high deductible, copayments and out-of-pocket limits.”

“I wrote all the numbers down, in case I didn’t make it through the surgery, so Donna could get my pension,” Gardner said. “I didn’t trust Momentive to call her and say she was entitled to it.”

The Gardners’ 2017 deductible would drop to $600 each, but their monthly premium soared from $262 to $1,152 per month — a hike Momentive promised to offset for already-retired workers under 65 with a $400 monthly subsidy. He got his first subsidy check on January 27, 2017. As a retiree, Gardner was one of the lucky ones. The younger generation was battling a contract that offered them expensive insurance while they worked — and nothing when they were finished with their working lives.

***

As the strike wore on, it drew the attention of elected officials in the area. Twenty-one Albany County lawmakers wrote to Momentive chief executive Jack Boss that the proposed contract seemed “to greatly hurt retirees and take too many health care and retirement benefits away from active employees.” State comptroller Tom DiNapoli reached out to Apollo; he has New York’s state-employee pensions partially invested through the firm. “I urge you to encourage Momentive to work diligently towards an expeditious settlement of this dispute on terms that are fair to labor and management,” he wrote. On the picket line in Waterford, one popular sign slung around the necks of strikers called out Apollo’s chief executive by name: hedge fund billionaire leon black, tell momentive: don’t destroy good jobs.

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Union strikers hold a sign outside of Momentive CEO Jack Boss’s home near Saratoga Springs. (Jonno Rattman)

In early February 2017, likely facing pressure from the governor’s office and intense publicity around both the strike and Momentive’s high-profile shareholders, Boss contacted the union’s regional leadership, bypassing the local chapter, and offered to resume negotiations. Four days later, a tentative deal was reached. Governor Andrew Cuomo, in his first public statement on the strike, announced his support for the deal, calling it key to “investing in the [union’s] world-class workforce, restoring operations at the plant and keeping upstate New York moving forward.”

Under the proposed new contract, to be voted on February 13 and 14, Momentive would keep matching 401(k) contributions of workers whose pensions had previously been frozen and would pay each striking employee a $2,000 bonus upon returning to work. In exchange, the union would accept the proposed health care amendments for current workers — more expensive premiums and deductibles. The company, rather than provide health insurance to future retirees, agreed to give at least 100 veteran workers a $40,000 cash bonus upon retirement — around $23,000 after taxes — that would hopefully cover any medical expenses before workers were eligible for Medicare at age 65. Though this was a win for the union, the next round of negotiations, in 2019, could decide the future of whether retirees will continue benefitting from Momentive’s medical coverage. “We have the right to negotiate now, which we didn’t have before last year’s strike,” says Patrignani. “It was going to sunset, but it’s still a topic of bargaining for future contracts.”

“You either have a preexisting condition, or you have an underlying condition, or you have an undiagnosed condition because of the inherent risk of working in a chemical plant,” said Robert Hohn, a 55-year-old employee. “You would probably have to pay a high premium and a high deductible. Would $23,000 cover that if something went wrong?” Hohn’s wife has degenerative disc disease, which requires constant care, and chronic gastrointestinal inflammation. Under the new contract, Hohn would have to pay $74 per week for him and his wife, with a $3,500 deductible and an annual maximum payment of $7,000. (Most workers signed up for this plan, which is the cheaper of the two; the other option has a $12,000 out-of-pocket maximum for a family). “The health care is going to kill me,” he said the day of the vote. “With my wife’s condition, we will definitely be hitting the maximum every year.” When the new contract came up for a vote, he felt he had no choice but to vote no. (At the beginning of 2018, Hohn’s wife left the insurance plan; he now pays $36 per week and a deductible for himself of $1,750.)

But many other workers feared that if the contract didn’t pass, some would cross the picket line to return to work, giving up their representation and fracturing the union. “They are pitting us against one another and using that to their advantage,” one worker said as he waited in line to vote on the proposed contract. “People are scared, feeling forced to vote ‘yes,’ even though the contract isn’t much better than what we went on strike for.”

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A classified ad for temporary replacement chemical operators in the Saratogian newspaper on a table in the union’s break house.

This internal tension became more and more apparent as the strike wore on, endless weeks of picketing outside during the coldest part of the year for upstate New York. “When it comes to these guys losing their health care, I should give a fuck?” one Momentive worker, speaking on condition of anonymity, wondered aloud in January, before the new union contract was ratified. “Why should I care about you when you didn’t give a shit about me in the past?”

Like some other younger union workers at the plant, he was in the minority and had voted yes on the contract back in September, recalling the wage cuts and pension freezes of years past. To them, the older generation were on their way out; the younger workers needed this place to provide for their families for decades to come. They wanted a fair contract for everyone, but they didn’t want to ruin what they had already — a stable job — and were willing to sacrifice benefits in the process.

Apollo has shut down other manufacturing plants in the past, and that threat was real for workers on the picket line. Noranda Aluminum’s Missouri plant once employed over 800 union workers. Then it began a slow decline, and after Apollo sold its position in 2015, the plant shut down in early 2016. To some workers, a long and intense strike could make that possibility a reality. “To me, it’s not worth losing all of this. If they shut down, where will we go?” said another during the strike. “Stop whining and move forward. These old guys, they’ve had it so good for so long that they don’t want to give anything up. Sometimes, to me, it’s better to take one step back so I am able to still move forward — not like this situation now.”

The contract passed on February 14, 2017. The men went back to work within days. “They didn’t achieve everything they wanted,” said Bob Master, the union’s legislative director for the region. “But sometimes the fruits of victory don’t show up until later on, during the next round of negotiations, when the company remembers the spirit and determination of a united workforce.”

***

Robert Hohn and his coworkers are already anxious about what new concessions their next contract negotiation in 2019 might bring. Since the company’s sale to private equity a decade ago, men like Ron Gardner, who went into bankruptcy after leaving his home for a double-wide trailer and fought cancer from exposure at the plant, have watched as their Wall Street–backed corporation trimmed job benefits they’d counted on for decades — benefits all the more crucial now, as they face retirement tinged with the threat of cancer. This time around, it was health care for retirees. What will it be next time?

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Outside the entrance gate of the Momentive chemical plant. (Jonno Rattman)

Apollo, meanwhile, announced in July 2017 that the firm had raised $24.7 billion for its latest global buyout fund, the largest sum of leveraged-buyout capital ever raised by a private equity firm, poised to pave the way for many more acquisitions like the one that created Momentive. Up in Waterford, there are whispers that Apollo is even trying to force the landlord to sell the hot dog shack — which the union still uses as it’s headquarters — and its surrounding land rights.

But despite these big-picture moves by corporate financiers, workers at the plant are still focused on their benefits — assets that are crucial to their survival. “I still don’t trust Momentive,” Gardner told me. The company had already cut his pay. What, he wondered, would prevent it from eventually taking away the insurance subsidy he received each month? If he lost the subsidy before he got Medicare, he explained at his dining room table, he won’t be able to afford health insurance. “After that, I don’t know what would happen,” he added, looking out the window. It was starting to rain. “If the cancer came back and I didn’t have coverage, I would die.”

***

Ian Frisch is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, Playboy, and Vice, among others. His first book, on magic and the secret lives of the subculture’s most prominent young magicians, will be published in 2019 by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. 

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Jonno Rattman

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Sean Cooper

When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

(Photo: Getty)

Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
Read more…

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

Transi tomb, Lula Tahula

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.
Read more…

How Lobbyists Normalized the Use of Chemical Weapons on American Civilians

Ferguson, Missouri, November 24, 2014. Photo: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images.

Anna Feigenbaum | An Excerpt from: Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of WWI to the Streets of Today | Verso | November 2017 | 22 minutes (6,015 words) 

* * *

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology.

With his thick moustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’s passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington, DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.” The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas. Fries capitalized on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

Manufacturers maneuvered their way around the Geneva Protocol, navigating through international loopholes with ease. But these frontier pursuits could not last forever. The nascent tear gas industry would come to face its biggest challenge yet, in the unlikely form of US senators. In the 1930s two separate Senate subcommittees were tasked with investigating the dodgy sales practices of industrial munitions companies and their unlawful suppression of protest.

General Fries’s deep personal commitment to save the Chemical Warfare Service won him both allies and critics, often in the same breath. Already known for his staunch anticommunism and disdain for foreigners of all kinds, Fries was an unapologetic proponent of military solutions for dissent both at home and abroad. A journalist for the Evening Independent wrote that Fries was often “accused of being an absolute militarist anxious to develop a military caste in the United States.” But to those who shared his cause, Fries was an excellent figurehead for Chemical Warfare. A family man, a dedicated soldier, and a talented engineer, Fries was the perfect face of a more modern warfare.

Just as some in Europe argued that chemical weapons were a mark of a civilized society, for General Fries war gases were the ultimate American technology. They were a sign of the troops’ perseverance in World War I and an emblem of industrial modernity, showcasing the intersection of science and war. In an Armistice Day radio speech broadcast in 1924, Fries said, “The extent to which chemistry is used can almost be said today to be a barometer of the civilization of a country.” This was poised as a direct intervention to the international proposal for a ban on chemical weapons, as preparations for the Geneva Convention were well under way. If chemical weapons were banned, Fries knew it would likely mean the end of the CWS—and with it his blossoming postwar career. Read more…

Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life

(Sankai / Getty Images)

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.

This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.

As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.

During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.

I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.

I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?

As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?

When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.

“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.

***

It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.

For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.

On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t  planned on having a husband or a house.

The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.

***

The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.

I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.

Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.

A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.

***

Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.

Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.

I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.

In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.

I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.

The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.

One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.

A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”

“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.

“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.

My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.

“Why must everyone match?” I asked.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?

But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.

So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.

Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?

I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.

Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.

I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.

***

A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.

Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.

The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”

I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.

I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that  I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.

At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.

I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.

“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”

“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.

One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.

P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.

His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”

“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.

I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.

“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.

If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.

“Can we please?” I said.

“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.

* * *

Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.

We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.

People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.

I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.

We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.

“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.

“That’s correct,” P.J. said.

“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”

“We’ll be leaving by bus.”

I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?

A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.

It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.

You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.

Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.

Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.

“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”

The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.

We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.

* * *

From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.

How ‘Cops’ Became the Most Polarizing Reality TV Show in America

"Cops" screenshot
Another night, another arrest, on "Cops." (Cops.com/Langley Productions)

Tim Stelloh | The Marshall Project & Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,325 words)

This story was published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

***

Morgan Langley leans toward a large computer screen. He isn’t sure if the video clip is still there, posted to a random YouTube channel named after a ’90s punk-ska act, but after a few moments, he finds it. Out of a black screen flashes a white Ford Mustang with blacked-out windows and chrome rims. Langley, who is an executive producer of one of America’s longest-running reality shows, “Cops,” narrates. “This kid here is actually selling a thousand pills of ecstasy to an undercover cop,” he says excitedly.

On the screen, a skinny white kid with a straight-brim baseball cap and a collection of painful-looking face piercings has plunked down on the Mustang’s passenger seat. Next to him is a woman whose blurred face is framed by sandy blonde hair. They briefly discuss logistics, and a second guy with dark skin and wrap-around sunglasses hops in. He asks if she has the cash; she asks if he has the goods. He asks if she’s a cop; she laughs.

“Okay, we’re just gonna do it like this,” he says, grabbing a pistol from his waistband. “Just give me your money.” Seconds later, officers in green tactical gear swarm the car, and he’s nose-down on the pavement, handcuffed and delivering a tear-streaked explanation: “Sir, they gave me a gun and told me they were gonna kill me.” Read more…

We’re Not Done Here

CSA Images/Getty

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire.
— Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself.
— Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

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