Search Results for: Mars

Took You By Surprise: John and Paul’s Lost Reunion

Illustration by Homestead

David Gambacorta | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,128 words)

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water’s edge. They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon. Read more…

School for Girls

Illustration by Xulin Wang

Jasmin Aviva Sandelson | Longreads | June 2019 | 28 minutes (7,121 words)

 

I loved being one of your girls. I wasn’t your favorite, but I didn’t need to be. What we had was different.

I found you on that hiking trip to the Spanish mountains. At first I was wary — at our all-girls’ secondary school you were never alone. But in the thin air we climbed together, lotioned each other’s backs, and hand-washed our socks side-by-side. By the end of the week we felt joined, invincible. Remember how we made those campsite boys pitch our tents? That’s not character-building, the male teachers sneered. We just laughed. We were girls: 13 and power-thrilled. While the others hauled their packs up the dusty hill, we lay together on sleeping bags. Your hazel eyes beamed noise and mischief, and I had found my place.

Back in London, I came to you each day, bounding to your classroom after lunch in the cafeteria. The others were with you, but that didn’t stop me. It made me want you more.

Before all the danger, we dashed about, frantic. We sprawled on desks or piled in a corner. You whispered about our classmates — plain girls, weird ones — and the four of us laughed in sly peals. It was both cruel and loving.

Five sounds like an unstable number, but it wasn’t. It was safe. Maybe because there was one of you, and four of us. We gathered at your house each Saturday, and I passed the journey — the bus, two tubes, and the uphill walk — listening to those songs you liked that I’d Limewired onto my iPod: Death Cab for Cutie, The Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay.

The others lived far away, too, some farther than me, but we all hauled our clothes and makeup across the city to get dressed in your bedroom for whatever we had planned: Smirnoff Ices in the park, a lax-bouncered bar, a house party with boys from our brother school.

We shook out our stuff on your big bed, which had space on either side like an adult’s bed, like my parents’ bed, not like my bed, pushed against a wall. We tried on each other’s things and crowded your full-length mirror as Jack Johnson sang through your iPod speaker.

“Pass the panox!” Ashley said, and you tossed the thumb-sized tube of medicated zit cream that you could only get in America, where your mom was from, and where you went every year. In the drawers that pulled out from under from your bed, you stored the things you brought back from New York: moisturizer with fake-tan, spray deodorant, and panoxyl.

We called it panox because we abbreviated everything.

“Emma, your skirt looks beaut,” I said, as you smoothed the white denim.

Oh em gee, totes,” Ashley said, dabbing her chin with the pad of her pinky.

We all spoke the same way, rhythms charged and exclusive like an electric fence.

Ashley was your best friend. She didn’t need panoxyl. Her skin was clear and framed by gold hair that reached the lean arcs of her waist. But even though she had all that I didn’t envy her. She didn’t crackle and sparkle like you did; she couldn’t combust into cackles like you and me.

As Ashley capped the cream, I sprayed the air around myself with your perfume and pulled on your leggings. I’d liked my legs covered since I was 6 or 7, back when my friends in gymnastics learned back handsprings while I was stuck with walkovers. In the cool gym, my thighs stayed pink when chill laced theirs with that wine-colored mottle. Mine touched all the way up. Theirs didn’t. To practice, I wore shorts over my leotard.

But you didn’t need leggings. Your legs were firm, cut with muscle down each thigh and behind the knees. I liked your legs. I also liked your straight white teeth — American teeth — and your full, flushed cheeks. I liked your honey-colored hair, the way the thick drape glinted in the light like amber. You were insecure about your stomach and hips — a little bigger than mine and the other girls’ — so I pretended not to notice when you tugged your shirt off your skin so it didn’t cling. To me, all parts of you, hard and soft, were lovely.

Once we were dressed, spritzed, and painted, the five of us — you, me, Ashley, Kat and Kay — trooped down three flights of stairs. In your kitchen, we piled around one corner of the wooden table that could seat 12, and ate whatever your mom cooked, something like pasta with tomato sauce, because she, like you, was a vegetarian. Your mom perched as we ate, not eating herself, but watching you chew with bird eyes, hard and blue. I was usually still hungry because she didn’t cook that much, so I’d buy a chocolate bar from the shop at the station. I always shared it around, but you never took any. Neither did Ashley. The two of you linked arms as Kat and Kay and I ate it up, square by square.

We also bought drinks at the station shop. Kat was 4’10 and looked even younger than 14, but she flashed her older sister’s passport and heaved our low-shelf vodka onto the counter. Glenns or Kirov tasted fine with enough Diet Coke. Kat and Kay bought regular Coke — “full fat Coke,” we called it. You glanced at them and clutched your own bottle closer.

At house parties, we’d flirt limply with whoever, but then you and I would run off. We peeked in bathrooms, jumped on boys’ beds, had swordfights with baguettes grabbed from bread bins, and gave each other hickeys. We looked each other in the eyes and laughed — laughter like a fist around our stomachs as we shook with devilish synchrony.

When we left one party for another, staggering down the sidewalk and dodging the cracks, I wanted to walk all night instead of going to some boy’s preened Hampstead house. I liked the in-between times best, and the befores and afters.

The afters looked like this: when we’d banked enough fun to last the school week, we all turned to you. We caught the last tube or you called a cab from Addison Lee, which we called Add Lee or just Add, and we lay our heads on each other’s shoulders as we waited to pull up at your front door. At the top of your house, in the “upstairs living room,” we flopped on those couches big enough to sleep four. The fifth, usually Kat, who was small and unfussy, lay on the carpet so thick she didn’t even need a sleeping bag. At home it took me hours to fall asleep. But beside you, my body unclenched and I slept deep and dreamless.

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It’s Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

T-Neck Records, 4th & B'way, Jive, Profile Records, Ruffhouse Records

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | June 2019 | 45 minutes (7,644 words)

 

Recently a friend told me, “When I was a newbie at Vibe magazine, I always thought, Mike looks like what I always imagined a real writer looked like, with your trenchcoat and briefcase and papers … and your hats. I can’t forget the hats.” Though he did forget the Mikli glasses and wingtips, I had to confess my style was one I’d visualized years before when I was a Harlem boy hanging out in the Hamilton Grange Library on 145th Street, looking at Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin book jacket pictures.

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The Gymnast’s Position

Illustration by Homestead

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,257 words)

More than two decades ago, a billboard went up in Salt Lake City near the 600 South exit of the I-15. It featured a young woman in repose clad in a sleeveless black leotard, her back to the viewer and her head tilted up. The weight of her upper body rested on her right arm, which was extended behind her; her left arm lay languidly on her bent left knee. Her right leg was extended straight in front of her, its foot arch, creating the appearance of a straight line from hip to toe.

The angle of the woman’s head seemingly bathed her face in light, her long curly blonde hair falling freely down her neck. The pose was reminiscent of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only inverted.

Passersby unable to make out the words printed in small text beneath the image would be forgiven for not knowing what exactly the billboard was advertising. Was it selling a dance performance or was it an ad for workout apparel or a photography exhibit at a local gallery? Visually, there were few clues.
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The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

morkeman / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

“Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” While Naomi Wolf’s intellectual side failed her last week, her public side did not. That first line was her measured response when a BBC interviewer pointed out — on live radio — that cursory research had disproven a major thesis in her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (she misinterpreted a Victorian legal term, “death recorded,” to mean execution — the term actually meant the person was pardoned). Hearing this go down, journalists like me theorized how we would react in similar circumstances (defenestration) and decried the lack of fact-checkers in publishing (fact: Authors often have to pay for their own). The mistake did, however, ironically, offer one corrective: It turned Wolf from cerebral superhero into mere mortal. No longer was she an otherworldly intellect who could suddenly complete her Ph.D. — abandoned at Oxford when she was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-’80s, Outrages is a reworking of her second, successful, attempt — while juggling columns for outlets like The Guardian, a speaking circuit, an institute for ethical leadership, and her own site, DailyClout, not to mention a new marriage. Something had to give, and it was the Victorians.

Once, the public intellectual had the deserved reputation of a scholarly individual who steered the public discourse: I always think of Oscar Wilde, the perfect dinner wit who could riff on any subject on command and always had the presence of mind to come up with an immortal line like, “One can survive everything nowadays except death.” The public intellectual now has no time for dinner. Wolf, for instance, parlayed the success of her 1991 book The Beauty Myth into an intellectual career that has spanned three decades, multiple books, and a couple of political advisory jobs, in which time her supposed expertise has spread far beyond third-wave feminism. She has become a symbol of intellectual rigor that spans everything from vaginas to dictatorships — a sort of lifestyle brand for the brain. Other thought leaders like her include Jordan Peterson, Fareed Zakaria, and Jill Abramson. Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.

* * *

I accuse the Age of Enlightenment of being indirectly responsible for 12 Rules for Life. The increasingly literate population of the 18th century was primed to live up to the era’s ultimate aspiration: an increasingly informed public. This was a time of debates, public lectures, and publications and fame for the academics behind them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one. In his celebrated “The American Scholar” speech from 1837, Emerson provided a framework for an American cultural identity — distinct from Europe’s — which was composed of a multifaceted intellect (the One Man theory). “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future,” he said. “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” While Emerson argued that the intellectual was bound to action, the “public intellectual” really arrived at the end of the 19th century, when French novelist Émile Zola publicly accused the French military of antisemitism over the Dreyfus Affair in an open letter published in  L’Aurore newspaper in 1898. With  “J’Accuse…!,” the social commentary Zola spread through his naturalist novels was transformed into a direct appeal to the public: Observational wisdom became intellectual action. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness,” he wrote. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

The public intellectual thenceforth became the individual who used scholarship for social justice. But only briefly. After the Second World War, universities opened up to serve those who had served America, which lead to a boost in educated citizens and a captive audience for philosophers and other scholars. By the end of the ’60s, television commanded our attention further with learned debates on The Dick Cavett Show — where autodidact James Baldwin famously dressed down Yale philosopher Paul Weiss — and Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. (also famously destroyed by Baldwin), which would go on to host academics like Camille Paglia in the ’90s. But Culture Trip editor Michael Barron dates the “splintering of televised American intellectualism” to a 1968 debate between Gore Vidal — “I want to make 200 million people change their minds,” the “writer-hero” once said — and Buckley, which devolved into playground insults. A decade later, the public intellectual reached its celebrity peak, with Susan Sontag introducing the branded brain in People magazine (“I’m a book junkie. … I buy special editions like other women shop for designer originals at Saks.”)

As television lost patience with Vidal’s verbose bravado, he was replaced with more telegenic — angrier, stupider, more right-wing — white men like Bill O’Reilly, who did not clarify nuance but blustered over the issues of the day; the public intellectual was now all public, no intellect. Which is to say, the celebrity pushed out the scholar, but it was on its way out anyway. By the ’80s, the communal philosophical and political conversations of the post-war era slunk back to the confines of academia, which became increasingly professionalized, specialized, and insular, producing experts with less general and public-facing knowledge. “Anyone who engages in public debate as a scholar is at risk of being labelled not a serious scholar, someone who is diverting their attention and resources away from research and publicly seeking personal aggrandizement,” one professor told University Affairs in 2014. “It discourages people from participating at a time when public issues are more complicated and ethically fraught, more requiring of diverse voices than ever before.” Diversity rarely got past the ivy, with the towering brilliance of trespassers like Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, among other marginalized writers, limited by their circumstances. “The white audience does not seek out black public intellectuals to challenge their worldview,” wrote Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s last year, “instead they are meant to serve as tour guides through a foreign experience that the white audience wishes to keep at a comfortable distance.”

Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided. Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The good professor hadn’t done his homework.” But neither have his fans.

But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off. Earlier this year, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, published Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. She was the foremost mind on journalism in the Trump era for roughly two seconds before being accused of plagiarizing parts of her book. Her response revealed that the authorship wasn’t exactly hers alone, a fact which only came to light in order for her to blame others for her mistakes. “I did have fact-checking, I did have assistants in research, and in some cases, the drafting of parts of the book,” she told NPR. “I certainly did spend money. But maybe it wasn’t enough.” Abramson’s explanation implied a tradition in which, if you are smart enough to be rich enough, you can pay to uphold your intellectual reputation, no matter how artificial it may be.

That certainly wasn’t the first time a public intellectual overrepresented their abilities. CNN host Fareed Zakaria, a specialist in foreign policy with a Ph.D. from Harvard — a marker of intelligence that can almost stand in for actual acumen these days — has been accused multiple times of plagiarism, despite “stripping down” his extensive workload (books, speeches, columns, tweets). Yet he continues to host his own show and to write a column for The Washington Post in the midst of a growing number of unemployed journalists and dwindling number of outlets. Which is part of the problem. “What happens in the media is the cult of personality,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Livingston Awards and Knight-Wallace Fellowship, in the Times. “As long as it’s cheaper to brand individual personalities than to build staff and bolster their brand, they will do it.” Which is why Wolf, and even Abramson, are unlikely to be gone for good.

To be honest, we want them around. Media output hasn’t contracted along with the industry, so it’s easier to follow an individual than a sprawling media site, just like it’s easier to consult a YouTube beauty influencer than it is to browse an entire Sephora. With public intellectuals concealing the amount of work required of them, the pressure to live up to the myth we are all helping to maintain only increases, since the rest of us have given up on trying to keep pace with these superstars. They think better than we ever could, so why should we bother? Except that, like the human beings they are, they’re cutting corners and making errors and no longer have room to think the way they did when they first got noticed. It takes significant strength of character in this economy of nonstop (and precarious) work to bow out, but Ta-Nehisi Coates did when he stepped down last year from his columnist gig at The Atlantic, where he had worked long before he started writing books and comics. “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that,” he told The Washington Post. “I want to be a writer. I’m not a symbol of what The Atlantic wants to do or whatever.”

* * *

Of course a public intellectual saw this coming. In a 1968 discussion between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on identity in the technology age (which explains the rise in STEM-based public intellectuals), the latter said, “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.” The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality. But an increasingly intelligent public is gaining ground.

The “Public Intellectual” entry in Urban Dictionary defines it as, “A professor who spends too much time on Twitter,” citing Peterson as an example. Ha? The entry is by OrinKerr, who may or may not be (I am leaning toward the former) a legal scholar who writes for the conservative Volokh Conspiracy blog. His bad joke is facetious, but not entirely inaccurate — there’s a shift afoot, from the traditional individual public intellectual toward a collective model. That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community. This is a reversion to one of the early definitions of public intellectualism by philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist,” he wrote in his Prison Notebooks — first published in 1971. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the room, as long as you can make it move.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Oklahoma: A Reading List

A stunning lightning bolt at sunset under a severe thunderstorm with a dirt road vanishing into the distance, taken near Magnum, Oklahoma, Tornado Alley, USA. Getty Images

A few nights ago I filled my bathtub with blankets and every pillow in my house, set a lantern and four bottles of water beside me, and took shelter. On my laptop, I watched the local news, where weathermen urged drivers to clear the roads and pointed at cloud rotations. The skies, through the screen, looked like oceans inverted: clouds rolled like tidal waves at too fast a pace and swirled like aerial eddies. Usually I love the openness of Oklahoma, the way a sunrise here can tinge the world any number of sherbet hues, but that night, from my tub, the heavens only looked ominous.

For an hour I watched the color-coded markings on the map, scanning for my small city, and only went to bed after the red and green splotched signs of danger had passed north, to Kansas. Even then, I didn’t sleep. I listened to the hail and rain pound my roof. I worried for people, animals, and houses in the storm’s path. I wondered if there would be an undetected storm moving toward me in the night, a tornado that might whip through the cover of dark as one had when I was in college, hitting my home when none of us were inside.

The morning after the storm, robins emerged from hiding and hopped across my yard with spiky hair and tussled feathers. Rain drained across the red clay in rivulets. Gray skies cleared into sun, and a soft summer breeze rustled honeysuckle, stirring the scent. This is Oklahoma in spring: mercurial, dangerous, beautiful. Here, I feel closer to the elements than I ever have before. Watching a bird prey upon a baby snake from my kitchen window, tearing the red inner meat into shreds, or witnessing the sky meld from blue to the shade of a bruise in moments, I have grown attuned to the thin line between awe and fear.

I am leaving this state very soon, and it’s filled me with the kind of ache for understanding that so often accompanies a goodbye, a sense that I can never know quite enough. Though I’ve explored great swaths of the state; learned the habits of starlings that murmur at daybreak and dusk; taught students from a variety of different towns; listened to Dear Oklahoma, a podcast where writers ruminate and examine the way in which Oklahoma is a part of their work; and tried my best to understand the histories of this place, this state still escapes my description. As a way of getting outside my own experience, I have turned to the words of others. I don’t think there’s any way to capture the vastness of this place — and this is by no means a comprehensive list — but below is a collection of stories that offer a glimpse.

1. Pawhuska or Bust: A Journey to the Heart of Pioneer Woman Country (Khushbu Shah, October 5, 2017, Thrillist)

With only oil and cattle to rely on as industries, rural Pawhuska, Oklahoma was at risk of becoming a ghost town until Ree Drummond stepped in. Also known as “The Pioneer Woman,” Drummond is a Food Network Star known for her marriage to a cattle-rancher and what fans describe as her “real” food. After Drummond opens a restaurant called “The Mercantile” in Pawhuska, Khushbu Shah flies from New York to better understand Drummond’s influence on Oklahoma’s cultural scene and economy, and why so many visitors flock to a restaurant seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Similar sentiments were later echoed by every Pioneer Woman fan I spoke to, the vast majority of whom were white and from the Midwest or the South, like the three tall and husky female friends who told me they’d driven 13 hours from Indiana because Drummond makes ‘real American food’ and ‘the stuff you actually want to eat.’

2. They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants. (Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, October 4, 2017, Reveal)

Given the option between prison and a rehab program called CAAIR (nicknamed “the Chicken Farm”), Brad McGahey chose the latter. Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, in this harrowing piece of investigative journalism, reveal that CAAIR, located in northeastern Oklahoma, relies on unpaid labor from thousands of defendants. Additionally, though marketed as a rehab program, participants receive very little medical care or treatment.

‘They came up with a hell of an idea,’ said Parker Grindstaff, who graduated earlier this year. ‘They’re making a killing off of us.’

3. A Bend in the River (Pamela Colloff, July 2002, Texas Monthly)

Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a ‘sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.’ Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away.

In this riveting, haunting longform piece, Pamela Colloff writes about the murder of Heather Rich, and the impact her death had on the community of Waurika, Oklahoma, as well as the ways in which place and landscape influenced the investigation and subsequent events.

4. Why Black People Own Guns (Julia Craven, December 26, 2017, Huffpost)

Julia Craven interviewed 11 black gun owners in order to better understand their relationships to firearms. Though each of these accounts are important in their own right, RJ Young speaks specifically about his experiences with gun ownership as a black man in Oklahoma.

If I could walk around Oklahoma and not count how many black folks were in the room, I’d probably feel better about firearms as a black man. I’d probably feel safer walking around with one. But the fact is, most people have a narrow view of who I am.

Young’s book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey into Guns offers more thorough insight his personal experiences with guns in Oklahoma within the context of a well-researched, larger cultural framework.

5. Spiritual Affliction: A Thank You Note to Oklahoma (Kate Strum, October 1, 2018, Hippocampus)

After moving to Oklahoma for graduate school, Kate Strum becomes fervent to understand the landscape: she travels to various parts of the state, engages politically, experiences the severity of elements, and makes meaningful relationships with people who have been here longer than she. And still, Oklahoma is somewhat elusive, though this essay is a beautiful rumination on Strum’s time spent here.

I am at once furious about what is wrong here and losing patience with the opinions of outsiders. I am home. I am marching at the capitol in the morning and late night on social media I am telling my friends on the coasts that they don’t get it. I shake my head when they read articles about rural America and think they know us.

6. Grace in Broken Arrow (Kiera Feldman, May 23, 2012, This Land)

Rather than taking reports of child molestation to the police or the Department of Human Services, the leaders of Grace Church, a Christian school that featured amenities like a ball pit, soda shoppe, and an antique carousel, instead held meetings to address what they didn’t believe to be that serious of an issue. Kiera Feldman, by interviewing survivors, former employees, and conducting immense amounts of research, brings to light a sickening tale of how Aaron Thompson, a former PE teacher at the school, molested boys there for years.

Grace Church was Oklahoma’s Penn State of 2002. After such things come to light, we always wonder: how on earth did that ever happen?

Here is how it happened.

7. Landlocked Islanders (Krista Langlois, November 16, 2016, Hakai Magazine)

Marshallese citizens, granted indefinite permission to live and work in the U.S. as a result of an agreement made with the U.S. during Marshallese independence, are leaving the Marshall Islands due to factors like climate change and lack of opportunities. As Krista Langlois writes, “by the year 2100, it’s conceivable that climate change will force the entire population of the Marshall Islands to US shores.” Many Marshallese migrants are ending up in Enid, Oklahoma.

Though Enid seems like an improbable place for Pacific Islanders to settle, it is, in a way, familiar. The first Marshallese came here with missionaries about 40 years ago, and wrote home about the jobs that could be had in meat-processing factories, and the public schools their children could attend. Eventually, family joined family.

8. The Teachers’ Strike and the Democratic Revival in Oklahoma (Rivka Galchen, May 28, 2018, The New Yorker)

Oklahoma teachers, rightfully tired of working multiple jobs to provide for their families and paying large sums of money for their own school supplies, walked out of school in April 2018. Some teachers drove to the capitol, where they asked for pay raises and better funding for their schools. Others walked in protest, making their way through “snow, lightning, and an earthquake.” Rivka Galchen examines the unique political composition of Oklahoma and chronicles the events of the two-week teachers’ walkout in Oklahoma in this longform piece.

The state’s license plates once read “Native America,” though almost no tribes are native to the area; they were sent there in the Trail of Tears. And Oklahomans are proud to be called Okies, a term coined by Californians to disparage people who were fleeing the Dust Bowl.

Related read: How Oklahoma’s Low Pay Dashed My Hopes of Teaching in My Tribal Community, March 28, 2018, Education Week

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

At Transformation

Illustration by Brittany Molineux

Jane Demuth | Longreads | May 2019 | 23 minutes (5,756 words)

It’s March 13th 2017, the eve of a late season snow storm that will blanket the Northeast and shut down major cities, and I’m on the ninth floor of a high-rise hotel in downtown Philadelphia chugging bottles of laxatives on a tightly prescribed schedule and making regular trips to the toilet. I am alone. As I count down hours one by one, my mind is reluctant either to focus or to rest. I flip through the TV channels briefly, but none of the broadcasts catch my interest. I talk to my brother on the phone several times; he is also in the city, and wants to know if I need anything or would like his company. It is thoughtful and generous of him to offer, but solitude feels like the right choice for me in this moment. I do not know what moods will strike me in the coming hours, but in the past my fears have sometimes coalesced in a fiery blaze of anger, and I do not wish to subject my brother to this. For an hour or so, I listen to music on my headphones, but the songs toward which I thought I would gravitate on this day are not hitting the emotional sweet spots I’d hoped and expected they would. Mostly I nap, on and off, between bottles of laxatives, prophylactic antibiotics, and urgent visits to the washroom. This morning I awoke at home in the Hudson Valley, feeling calm and clear for the first time in months, but a lengthy run of restless nights and a mounting air of anticipation have taken their toll on me. Tomorrow I will be checking out of the hotel early, and although a pharmaceutically induced period of unconsciousness is on the agenda for later in the day, right now I am grateful for actual sleep in whatever increments it offers itself.
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Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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Falling Stars: On Taking Down Our Celebrity Icons

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 7 minutes (1, 868 words)

The shorthand iconography of the star has been the iconography of excess — furs, gold, pearls, diamonds, stacks of cash, lots of lights, lots of people. It’s luxury personified, the human being at its apex, the kind of intermediary between gods and humans that the ancient Egyptians didn’t just dress with jewels, but buried with them, transcending mortality. And who doesn’t want to be immortal? Especially these days, when we are very much the opposite: when aspiration has been replaced with desperation and extinction is the inevitable end, or maybe hell, but definitely not heaven. The old accoutrements of success, the ones that defined celebrity — wealth, power, decadence — are going extinct too. And anyone who continues to buy into them, is either performing satire (see Billy Porter in city-spanning golden wings) — or is, well, Drake.

The “God’s Plan” singer, who upon last estimation was worth around $90 million, unveiled his own private Boeing 767 cargo plane, Air Drake, in an Instagram video last week, a pair of praying hands on the tail fin speaking for us all. “No rental, no timeshare, no co-owners,” he said. No reality check either, apparently. While Drake framed it as his way of supporting a homegrown business (Ontario’s Cargojet), his very own “Heat of the Moment” lyrics — “All the niggas we don’t need anymore / And all the cops are still hangin’ out at the doughnut shops / Talkin ’bout how the weather’s changin’ / The ice is meltin’ as if the world is endin’” — caused a number of people to point out his hypocrisy. (He captioned the video, “Nothing was the same for real,” which I don’t believe is a reference to the planet’s demise, but maybe he was being meta.) It had been only seven months since Kanye and Kim Kardashian West were vilified for flying aboard a 660-seater Boeing. Basically alone. “No big deal,” Kardashian West said on Instagram. “Just like a chill room. This is, like, endless.” No, there’s an end. Their chill trip happened less than two months after the end days climate report came out.

At one point these stars were icons of the kind of success we aspired to. But having seen how the old capitalist system they symbolize has destroyed the world, the movement to destabilize it has also become a movement to destabilize them as its avatars. This includes idols of technology like Mark Zuckerberg, the once-envied wunderkind who is now someone who should be held “accountable”; business giants like Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose compensation is “insane” according to one member of the family dynasty; and political stars like Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, both of whom were called out for their campaigns’ big donors. In our culture today, the guy who makes music out of his closet has the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the revolutionaries are schoolchildren. “The star is meant to epitomize the potential of everyone in American society,” writes P. David Marshall in Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. “The dialectical reality is that the star is part of a system of false promise in the system of capital.”

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The debate over whether success should be defined by wealth goes as far back as civilization itself. I asked my brother, a philosophy professor specializing in the ancients (I know), when it first turned up in the literature, and he told me it was “the base note” through most of Plato. Then there was Socrates, who thought knowledge, not wealth, should be the marker of success, versus Aristotle, who thought wealth was essential to the good life. Regardless of their differences, greed, my brother said, was almost always considered pathological. But then along came capitalism, which was popularized (peut-être) by French socialist Louis Blanc, who wrote Organisation du Travail, in which he defined it as “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.” Within capitalism, greed became associated with productivity, which was correlated with a successful economy, and so greed was good (you try not to quote Gordon Gekko!). Along with it, those who were greedy were accepted, even admired, under certain conditions. A 2015 study had a bunch of U.K. teenagers excusing Bill Gates’s extreme wealth (more than $100 billion) as merit-based, the necessary evil of a capitalist system in which a hard-working individual can triumph the way they would like to one day.

The celebrity is the ultimate symbol of success, which, under capitalism, becomes the ultimate symbol of greed. “Celebrities reinforce the conception that there are no barriers in contemporary culture that the individual cannot overcome,” writes Marshall. And though Julius Caesar ended up on a coin, dating the monetization of fame back to ancient Rome, you can blame the French Revolution for a modern star like James Charles, who launched a YouTube channel of makeup tutorials at age 16 and within four years had more than 1.7 billion views. After the monarchy was overthrown, power and fame no longer required inheritance, which is why celebrity is sometimes (erroneously) associated with rebellion. But while the common man was ascending, so was individualism, along with mass media and the industrial revolution. The lord and serf were replaced by the businessman and employee and bourgeois culture expanded at the expense of its working-class analog. The icon of this new capitalist society, which had been weaned on the Romantic Era’s cult of personality, was the commodified individual who reinforced consumption: the celebrity. As Milly Williamson explains in Celebrity: Capitalism and the Making of Fame, “Celebrity offers images of inclusion and plenty in a society shaped by exclusion and structured in want.”

Is anyone playing the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game anymore? The object was to use anything you had access to, whether material, money, or people, to advance. It was clearly a meta-tongue-in-cheek bit of cutesy puff, but it also wasn’t. Kim Kardashian West is you in the game and you in real life. Consumerism isn’t just consumption, it’s emulation. We consume to improve ourselves as individuals — to make ourselves more like Kardashian West, who is presented as the pinnacle of success — as though our self-actualization were directly associated with our purchasing power. And the same way we have commodity selves (I am Coke, not Pepsi; Dell, not Mac) we have celebrity selves. For instance, I’m a Winona Ryder person, not a Gwyneth Paltrow person (is anyone?). So my identity could very well be solidified based on whether I can find that Tom Waits shirt she always wears. And in these days of faces of brands, shaping yourself around Kim Kardashian West can actually mean shaping yourself around a $15,000 dress. “It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds,” writes George Monbiot in The Guardian. “By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.”

So who cares, right? So what if I want to be a $5,000 Louis Vuitton bag slung over Michelle Williams’s shoulder? It’s a little limiting, I guess, but fine (maybe?) — if we can trust the world to run fairly around us. According to a 2007 study in the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Brits who closely followed celebrity gossip over other types of news were half as likely to volunteer, less politically engaged, and the least likely to vote or protest. “It’s the capacity of these public figures to embody the collective in the individual,” writes Marshall, “which identifies their cultural signs as powerful.” It also identifies them as inert proxies for real community action. There is a veneer of democracy to consumerism, in that we are free to choose what we buy. But we are exercising our freedom only through buying (never mind that the options aren’t infinite); we are not defined as citizens, but as consumers. That the consumer has eclipsed the citizen explains in part why the appeals around climate change have been increasingly directed at the individual, pointing out how they will personally suffer if the world around them does — in a sea of individuals, the planet’s distress was not impetus enough. “The most important democratic achievements have been the result of working-class struggle and collective movements,” writes Williamson. “What is really extraordinary about working-class identity is not the potential celebrity in each of us, but precisely the solidarity and collectivity that is largely hidden from media representations of ordinary people.”

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When Time released its list of the 100 most influential people in the world last month, I noticed that under the Icons category one of the images was a silhouette. Among all of those colourful portraits of famous faces, Mirian G. was an individual erased. I initially thought it was a power move, that this woman had chosen to trade in her identity for a larger cause. It turned out she was a Honduran asylum seeker, part of a class-action suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of families separated at the border, and that she had to be anonymous to protect herself. “In 2018, over 2,700 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border,” wrote Kumail Nanjiani. “Since that number is so unfathomably large, I think it is helpful to focus on one woman’s story.” In essence, the magazine found a way around the individual-as-icon, turning a spot for one into representation for many. It was a timely move.

It’s not that fame has become defunct — one study found that a number of millennials would literally trade their family for it — but celebrity isn’t the opiate it once was. Younger generations side-eye star endorsements, while online influencers, who affect the tone of friendly advice, have acquired monumental cache. (Though James Charles recently lost millions of YouTube subscribers following a very public fallout with fellow beauty vlogger Tati Westbrook, he still has more than 13 million.) It comes with a catch, though: Millennials will actually pay more for brands that are socially responsible. This aligns with the growing number of young activists, not to mention the U.S.’s youth voter turnout in 2018, the highest in a midterm election since 1982. As Williams concludes, “celebrity culture presents the human in commodity form, but it also consists of its opposite — the human can never be fully contained by the self-as-commodity, and the persistence of humanity is, in all circumstances, a cause for hope.”

While the citizen and consumer were once conflated, they now coexist, a separation that sometimes leads them to be at odds. The celebrity, the symbol of the latter, can in the same way clash with the former. In a context like this, Alyssa Milano’s ill-conceived sex strike, the latest case of a celebrity ham-fistedly endorsing feminist activism, is no longer simply swallowed in good faith. There is no good faith left, not even for our stars. They are symbols of an economy that consumes everything in its path, and struggling with them is part of a collective struggle with the inequitable, exploited world we live in, one in which each callout will hopefully add up to some semblance of change.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Technology Is as Biased as Its Makers

"Patty Ramge appears dejected as she looks at her Ford Pinto." Bettmann / Getty

Lizzie O’Shea | an excerpt adapted from Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Teach Us about Digital Technology | Verso | May 2019 | 30 minutes (8,211 words)

In the late spring of 1972, Lily Gray was driving her new Ford Pinto on a freeway in Los Angeles, and her thirteen-year-old neighbor, Richard Grimshaw, was in the passenger seat. The car stalled and was struck from behind at around 30 mph. The Pinto burst into flames, killing Gray and seriously injuring Grimshaw. He suffered permanent and disfiguring burns to his face and body, lost several fingers and required multiple surgeries.

Six years later, in Indiana, three teenaged girls died in a Ford Pinto that had been rammed from behind by a van. The body of the car reportedly collapsed “like an accordion,” trapping them inside. The fuel tank ruptured and ignited into a fireball.

Both incidents were the subject of legal proceedings, which now bookend the history of one of the greatest scandals in American consumer history. The claim, made in these cases and most famously in an exposé in Mother Jones by Mike Dowie in 1977, was that Ford had shown a callous recklessness for the lives of its customers. The weakness in the design of the Pinto — which made it susceptible to fuel leaks and hence fires — was known to the company. So too were the potential solutions to the problem. This included a number of possible design alterations, one of which was the insertion of a plastic buffer between the bumper and the fuel tank that would have cost around a dollar. For a variety of reasons, related to costs and the absence of rigorous safety regulations, Ford mass-produced the Pinto without the buffer.

Most galling, Dowie documented through internal memos how at one point the company prepared a cost-benefit analysis of the design process. Burn injuries and burn deaths were assigned a price ($67,000 and $200,000 respectively), and these prices were measured against the costs of implementing various options that could have improved the safety of the Pinto. It turned out to be a monumental miscalculation, but, that aside, the morality of this approach was what captured the public’s attention. “Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap,” Dowie wrote, “yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards.” Read more…