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America Is Still Hard To Find

Eugene A. Cernan holds the American flag during his first space walk, becoming the last man to walk on the moon. (NASA / Donaldson Collection / Getty Images)

Lily Meyer | Longreads | May 2019 | 12 minutes (3,115 words)

Catonsville, Maryland, is a quiet suburb of Baltimore, a leafy, American Dream-looking town where, in May 1968, a group of nine Catholic protestors led by pacifist priest Daniel Berrigan staged one of the most famous protests of the Vietnam War. As Berrigan describes it in America Is Hard to Find, a shaggy collection of letters and musings that functions roughly as his autobiography, “nine of us invaded the draft board at Catonsville, Maryland, extracted some 350 draft files and burned them in a parking lot nearby with homemade napalm.” Why? Because “it was better to burn papers than to burn children.”

The novelist Kathleen Alcott takes both the title and the spirit of her third book, America Was Hard to Find, from Berrigan. Alcott’s previous novels, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets and Infinite Home, are both elegant, contemporary stories set in extremely contained worlds. America Was Hard to Find, in contrast, stretches its limbs across two decades and two continents, plus the moon. It’s more structured than its namesake, but remains digressive and expansive, following a left-wing radical named Fay Fern and her loved ones across time and space. This includes outer space; Alcott’s history deviates very slightly from ours, and in her world, the first man on the moon was not Neil Armstrong but the fictional Vincent Kahn, Fay’s onetime lover and the father of her only child.

Vincent and Fay work as foils, as do Fay and her son, Wright. Through their shifting and overlapping perspectives, Alcott offers her own anti-war observation of Cold War America. She takes the political questions Berrigan lays out in America Is Hard to Find — what are the ethical limits of protest? What are the ethical limits of technology? Will citizens burning papers prevent a government from burning children? — and enacts them in slow, stylish, keenly observed prose. Read more…

How Refugees Die

AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris

John Psaropoulos | The Sewanee Review | Spring 2019 | 17 minutes (3.361 words)

 

This essay first appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country, which you can subscribe to here. Our thanks to the author and The Sewanee Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads

* * *

I met Doa Shukrizan at the harbormaster’s office in the port of Chania, in western Crete. She sat with her back to a balcony overlooking the street, and the strong morning light enveloped her delicate figure, so that there appeared to be even less of her than there was after her ordeal with the sea. Doa’s face had peeled from extreme sunburn; she spoke softly. Between the cavernous ceiling and polished concrete floor, the only furnishings were tables, chairs, and ring binders, so that voices, however slender, resounded. There were no secrets in this room. During the hour that we spoke, three coast guard officers sat at their desks not doing any work, transfixed by what she said.

Doa and her fiancé had been among some five hundred people who boarded a fishing trawler at the port of Damietta in the Nile Delta on September 6, 2014. Many, like Doa, were Syrian. Others were Palestinian or Sudanese. All were fleeing war and had paid smugglers to ferry them, illegally, to Italy.

Read more…

‘Give It Up For My Sister’: Beyonce, Solange, and The History of Sibling Acts in Pop

Frank Micelotta, Frank Leonhardt, Evan Agostini, Chris Pizzello, Jordan Strauss, Hubert Boesl / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,597 words)

Houston-born sisters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles couldn’t be more different. They emit different energies, seem to vibrate at different frequencies. Solange is the emo Cancerian who lunged at her brother-in-law in an elevator. Beyoncé, the preternaturally polished Virgo, clung to the corner and fixed her dress. Lately, I’ve been hung up on how they’re similar. I think it’s because, for people who’ve paid attention, it’s their differences that got drilled into us over the years. By the time Solange released her first record in December 2002, Beyoncé, with Destiny’s Child, had released four albums, earned three Grammy Awards, and was in the final recording sessions for her solo debut. Focusing on their differences was probably a strategic move dreamed up by their father, and, at the time, manager, Matthew Knowles, to maximize the commercial viability of the two artists. Yet, seventeen years later, in the spring of this year, both siblings released albums and accompanying films with musings on “home.”

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation. Both follow albums that were career highlights. Both build their foundations on rhythm, the voice, and vocal harmony. Both marry light and sound and knit their soundscapes into images. Both depend on the improvisational skill of a cohort of contributors. Beyoncé’s project, the live album companion to her Netflix documentary “Homecoming,” documented her two headlining sets at last year’s Coachella and layered the visuals and sonics of HBCU pageantry atop references to a specific, Southern emanation of blackness. Solange’s fifth studio album, When I Get Home, traveled the exact same terrain, but in a far-out, deconstructed way, with references to cosmic jazz and psychedelic R&B, black cowboys, undulating hips and mudras, and the skyscrapers and wide, green lawns of the sisters’ hometown.

It’s logical that if two people share a childhood home, they grow up to be into the same things. But it’s taken time — for us, as audiences, to widen our perspectives enough so that we can see, in the same frame, how they’re similar and how they’re not. It’s taken time for the two sisters to grow comfortable enough being themselves while publicly navigating the music industry as black women. To differentiate herself from her sister’s glamorous pop image, Solange initially emanated an alterna-vibe that resonated with those who may have liked Beyoncé, but felt hemmed in by her R&B fantasy, lead-girl-in-a-video perfection. While Bey rocked the trendy low-slung denim of the early aughts, went blonde, and mostly kept a huge mane of loose, blown out curls, Solange wore red box braids, and in her first video, a floor length patchwork skirt. She was the earthier sister, positioned in alignment with the diasporic neo soul scene of the late 90s. She had a baby, got married early, and lived with her young family, for a while, in Idaho. Then she sheared her long locks and quietly rented a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.


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We didn’t linger on or make much meaning from Solange’s time as a background dancer for her sister’s group, or how she’d replaced Kelly Rowland in the lineup for some tour dates when they opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000. But it did raise eyebrows when, during Solange’s Brooklyn years, Beyoncé began showing up at concerts of indie acts her sister put her on to.

Solange’s first album Solo Star covered a lot of musical ground, but didn’t make much of an impact commercially or otherwise. She was then 16. Between 2001 and early 2003, a number of female R&B vocalists made big Top 10 pop albums: Alicia Keys, Janet Jackson, Ameriie, Ashanti, Mya. Beyoncé’s 2003 debut (coupled with the rapid deterioration of the recording industry) seemed to flatten out the pop-R&B landscape like a grenade. Five years later, Solange released the Motown-influenced Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, then left her label. She independently released the 2012 EP “True.” Its lead single “Losing You,” a buoyant breakup bop, was a breakthrough. A Seat at the Table, with spoken word interludes that include interviews with her parents about black history and family, came out in the fall of 2016. It was Solange’s first album to debut at number one on the Billboard 200. By then, Beyoncé was talking about her mama’s and daddy’s roots, too, most explicitly, on Lemonade, her sixth studio project as a solo artist, which, just five months before, earned the same chart placement.  

* * *

According to Billboard, besides the Knowles sisters, in the history of the chart there have been only two other pairs of sibling solo artists in which each sibling has earned a number one pop album: Master P and Silkk the Shocker during a run of releases in the late nineties, and Janet and Michael Jackson. The Jacksons’ older brother, Jermaine, The Braxton sisters, Toni and Tamar, and the Simpson sisters, Jessica and Ashlee, have all earned albums in the Top 10. But the only solo siblings to earn number ones during the same calendar year have been Janet and Michael, Solange and Beyoncé.

The two projects are like fraternal twins—individually interesting, but fun and compelling to think about in relation.

Michael famously got his start in a band of brothers, The Jackson Five. After signing to Motown in 1969, their first four singles — “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save”, and “I’ll Be There” — all went to number one. Their father, Joseph Jackson, a former boxer and steelworker born in Arkansas, managed the band with reportedly horrid methods. Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, and Marlon all became capable musicians individually. But it was Janet, born eight years after Michael and too young to join her brothers’ band, who truly absorbed their ascent. She performed in the family’s variety show and TV sitcoms throughout the 70s, and beginning in the late 80s, released music that, arguably, approached Michael’s impact. Control, Rhythm Nation, Janet., and The Velvet Rope are gorgeous, singular statements that define pop-R&B and still sound alive.

Janet has earned more number one albums than Michael (seven to his six) and her singles have been in the Top 10 for more weeks than his (“That’s the Way Love Goes” was the longest running number one for either of them). For a while, the fiasco of Super Bowl 2004 derailed Janet’s career. She lost endorsement deals and had a long, marked decline in album sales. “Nipplegate” angered then CBS chairman Les Moonves so much that he’d reportedly ordered MTV and VH1 to stop playing her videos. Janet’s black fans always suspected something sinister at play. Last year, the New Yorker and New York Times published sexual assault allegations against Moonves, and his pattern of derailing women’s careers became public knowledge. Janet got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past March, and while that’s somewhat palliative, it doesn’t give back the lost years, or acknowledge her sprawling, multi-medium contributions to entertainment. Still, her reputation hasn’t had the kind of epic blemishes Michael’s has, and our current ferment of empowered, black women singers owes everything to her.

Though they’re starting to, Solange and Beyoncé haven’t leaned all the way in to their shared origin in the way of Michael and Janet in the ”Scream” video, where their charisma and similar, long-limbed, open hip-jointed athleticism is foregrounded in nearly every frame. We got glimpses at Solange’s set at Coachella in 2014, when Bey joined in for a dance break, and its reprise in Bey’s sets, a highlight of the 2019 film. Solange has, like Janet, who sang backup on Thriller, been all over Beyoncé’s catalog. And while coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be (the glamorous diva vs. the earthy bohemian), it still hasn’t gone far enough.

In Interview, Beyoncé asked her younger sister where she got her inspiration, and she answered,“For one, I got to have a lot of practice. Growing up in a household with a master class such as yourself definitely didn’t hurt.” She also namechecked Missy Elliot, who produced and provided vocals for some of Destiny’s Child’s finest tracks. In other words, she claimed her proximity to her older sister’s career, as nourishment, cultivation, as part of what undergirds her artistry. When Solange’s latest album launched, the NPR music critic Ann Powers made a playlist of its antecedents called the “mamas of Solange.” It included Alice Coltrane, Minnie Riperton, Tweet, Aaliyah, and TLC. It did not include Beyoncé or Destiny’s Child, contemporaries of some of the women who did make the list. Maybe it’s taken for granted? Stevie Wonder’s ambient album The Secret Life of Plants is brought up a lot in relation to When I Get Home, but The Writings on the Wall and Dangerously in Love are also important building blocks of the music Solange and most contemporary pop and R&B artists make. It feels incomplete to not say so. Similarly, when talking about Beyoncé, something’s missing when we don’t acknowledge how indebted she is to the cluster of women around her. Perhaps that’s leftover residue from the marketing machine of the late 90s and early aughts, too — an overemphasis on singularity.

* * *

When I Get Home’s interlude “S. MacGregor,” named after an avenue in Houston’s Third Ward, contains snippets of Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen performing a poem their mother, Vivian Ayers-Allen, wrote. Rashad and Allen make up another culturally significant sibling pair. There’s Fame!, The Cosby Show, and A Different World, but also the stage — Rashad is the first black woman to win a lead actress Tony, and Allen was nominated for Tony Awards for West Side Story and Sweet Charity.

Both sisters also had short-lived recording careers. Rashad released a tribute album to Josephine Baker in 1978 and an album of nursery rhymes in 1991. She memorably sang on multiple episodes of The Cosby Show. Allen released Special Look in 1989. It was a pop, dance-R&B concoction that sounds like a harder edged Paula Abdul, whose blockbuster Forever Your Girl had come out the year before. Today, Allen directs for TV and runs Los Angeles’ Debbie Allen Dance Academy, while Rashad directs for the stage.

Allen’s younger than Rashad by 2 years, and they have two older brothers: the jazz musician Andrew Arthur Allen, and Hugh Allen, a banker. Their parents’ nasty divorce in the mid-’80s got covered in Jet. I often wonder about the dynamics in high-intensity, high-achieving households like theirs. Some accounts say Solange felt neglected for parts of her childhood when her older sister’s group became the family business. The five-year age difference is too wide for straightforward competition, but not so for resentment. Some of my earliest memories are the legendary fights between my two older, high-achieving siblings. It still annoys me to think about how much time and energy their rivalry took up (and continues to take up) in our family. In an interview with Maria Shriver last year, Tina Knowles Lawson said she deliberately taught her daughters not to be intimidated by another woman’s shine and sent them to therapy early on to learn to protect and support each other. From the perspective of an outsider, it seems to have worked.

While coverage of black pop has evolved from the 90s and early 2000s, when Janet got blackballed and Beyoncé and Solange seemed to represent poles on a restricted continuum of what a black woman in pop could be, it still hasn’t gone far enough.

Family dynasties are neither new nor newly influential in pop. My mother adored the voice of Karen Carpenter, who’d gotten her start in a duo with her brother, Richard. The LPs of the Emotions, the Pointer Sisters, the Jones Girls, and Sister Sledge were in my  mother’s racks, too, — all vocal groups with at least one pair of siblings. The early years of rock and roll, the doo wop era, is full of crews of schoolmates, like the Chantels, the Marvelettes or the Supremes, or sibling groups like The Andrews Sisters, the Shangri-Las, and the Ronettes. Later, there’s DeBarge, the Emotions, The Sylvers, the Five Stairsteps, Wilson Phillips, the Winans, Ace of Base, Xscape, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, the Isley Brothers. Part of me wants to say it’s because of the genre’s origins in domestic spaces like the living room or the stoop, a refuge of creativity against the backdrop of chaotic 20th century urban life. Music education in schools provided training, as did the subtle rigor of the church, where troupes, quartets, and choirs led worship. When describing what’s special about “that sibling sound,” in 2014, Linda Ronstadt told the BBC: “The information of your DNA is carried in your voice, and you can get a sound [with family] that you never get with someone who’s not blood-related to you.” What a voice sounds like, in large part, depends on biology and anatomy—the shape of the head, chest, the construction of the sinus cavities. It makes sense that the sweetest, most seamless harmonizing could happen between people who share DNA. And as audiences, we like being witness to the chemistry of our performers. It can feel fun and somewhat uncanny to watch people who look a little bit alike sing and dance in formation.

None of this completely explains how much popular music has historically been “A Family Affair” (a number one in 1971 for Sly and the Family Stone, a group comprised of Sylvester Stewart and his siblings Freddie and Rose, with baby sister, Vaetta, in charge of the backing vocalists). Or how much, aside from the Jonas Brothers, the top 40 of the past few months is absent sibling groups, or, really, groups of any kind. Haim, the trio of sisters Este, Danielle, and Alana from the San Fernando Valley, had Top 10 albums in 2013 and 2017, and will co-headline this year’s Pitchfork’s festival with the Isley Brothers and Robyn. They sing in effortless three-part harmony, are aggressive on guitar, bass, and percussion, and write their own songs. A New York Times critic called them proudly “anachronistic,” because their sound is a throwback to earlier eras and bands like Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child, whose Stevie Nicks-sampling “Bootylicious,” was the last pop number one from a girl group. In a 2011 piece for The Root, Akoto Ofori-Atta attributed the decline of vocal groups to, among other factors, reduced record label budgets and the “me-first” narcissism of social media. She also suggested the cyclical nature of music trends could mean that audiences will want to hear tight vocal harmonies again. I’d think that was impossible since digitization has meant that people don’t have to sing together anymore. But singing itself has gotten new life from young R&B artists like Ella Mai, Moses Sumney, and H.E.R., so who knows.

In 2015, Beyonce signed the sister duo Chloe+ Halle to her record label. She’d seen them on YouTube performing covers and accompanying themselves on keys in their living room.  The young women sing ethereal, soul-inflected harmonies, play multiple instruments and compose and produce their own music. They’re also actresses with recurring roles on “grown-ish.” Their first studio album The Kids are Alright released last year and earned the group two Grammy nominations. They performed at the ceremony, memorably, in the tribute to Donny Hathaway, and at the Grammy’s tribute to Motown, they performed the Marvelette’s “Please Mr. Postman,” Motown’s first number one. None of the singles from Chloe + Halle’s record have made much of a commercial impact or stuck with me yet, but, based on history, the incubation potential of the vocal group, the sibling group in particular, bodes well for longevity.

 

 

Editors Roundtable: Violence of Men, Money, and Space (Podcast)

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On our May 10, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Fact-checker Ethan Chiel, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


00:26 My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.
(Wil S. Hylton, May 8, 2019, The New York Times Magazine

“These are often snapshots or frames in the film of your life, and they don’t often take into account the frames that come after…something like this that is both personal and societal, you certainly should get applause for stepping forward and saying I did these things, I am responsible in this way, but the work continues forever and I agree that the applause can sound like absolution and it should not be.” –Aaron Gilbreath

In his essay, Hylton recounts being physically beaten by his cousin in an unprovoked attack. The piece also weaves in the deterioration, over a decade, of Hilton’s marriage, and examines how masculinity and the ideas around masculinity were a factor in both events.

The team discusses why these types of intimate family violence stories elicit a different reaction when written by women versus men and the tension surrounding the question of whom toxic masculinity hurts more: men or women?

11:06 “Going Under at the Playboy Club
(Josephine Livingstone, May 8, 2019, The New Republic)

“I think the thing we’re struggling over is intentional. Whether it was in 1963 or now, the idea that these women, these waiters, might sleep with you, is a big part of the business that is being sold.” –Kelly Stout

A follow-up to Gloria Steinem’s “A Bunny’s Tale” written in 1963, Livingstone’s piece is in explicit conversation with Steinem’s while grappling with gender performance at a place like The Playboy Club. The piece looks at how both writers examine how the playboy culture and the public conversation around it have changed in the ensuing years.

The team touches on the economic dynamics at play in the piece and “the strange thorny mix of labor and gender representation issues.” They talk about performances of gender and interrogating our reactions to these performances. Finally they look at Livingstone’s and Steinem’s roles as both participants and observers and the inherent reductionist problem of journalism’s assumption that a particular glimpse into a world is more full than it is.

23:20How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery”
(Jesse Barron, May 1, 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

“A story nominally about guns that really isn’t about guns at all.” –Ethan Chiel

Gun manufacturer Remington was bought by a private equity firm who moved manufacturing to Alabama and, in the process, pushed the company to bankruptcy. It’s a story about debt and finance and municipal government that looks at how when debt transfer is dressed up as job creation, responsibility is lost.

The team discusses the complex machinations of American finance and how the actual functioning of a company doesn’t always have to do with whether they live or die. Meanwhile, people’s belief that these things are happening in the free market, that meritocracy and supply and demand are the only things dictating whether companies survive, obscures what is really happening while allowing us to feel protected.

33:10The Race to Develop the Moon
(Rivka Galchen, April 29, 2019, The New Yorker)

“For fresh starts we used to have California, go west. Now we go up to the moon.” –Aaron Gilbreath

Galchen explores a renewed interest in the moon by China, Japan, Isreal, India, the EU, and the US. Not as a place to stake a claim for political reasons, as it was in the 60s and 70s, but as a place to exploit and monetize resources and start businesses.

The team discusses what might happen if we take our capitalist, resource-exploiting culture beyond our planet and whether we can bring our ability to observe and reflect on the human experience with us as well.

* * *

Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

I Entered the World’s Longest, Loneliest Horse Race on a Whim, and I Won

A horse flicks its tail for temporary relief from the persistently pestering flies on the Mongolian steppe. cookedphotos / iStock / Getty

Lara Prior-Palmer | an excerpt adapted from Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race | Catapult | May 2019 | 19 minutes (5,344 words)

It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an Alpine valley.

“Lara? Larah!”

Every morning the mother shrieked my name up the endless floors. “Time to feed the baby!”

I had taken the role to practice my German, but she only spoke in English. My jobs varied from sitting with the toddler to vacuuming up the dead skin that snowed from his father’s bottom.

The family never left their house except to get in their cars, which they kept tucked up in the garage. They viewed their valley through window frames as you would a photograph. So sedentary a lifestyle in such physical surroundings made me itch. At night I hatched plans to creep up the mountain and slide down the other side into Switzerland, yet the mother looked appalled when I so much as suggested running to the church and back.

By the time she sacked me a month later, my body was rusty and yearning for usage. I returned to the silent butterflies of an England on the brink of summer, seeking an experience unlike any I’d had before. In theory, this ought not to have been difficult. The most exciting moment in my eighteen years had been collecting chickens from Dorset on the train and wrapping them up in wine crates for Christmas presents. Read more…

If You Should Find Yourself in the Dark

Illustration by Wenting Li

Debbie Weingarten | Longreads | May 2019 | 14 minutes (3,460 words)

If your son cries in the night, begin a slow insistent hush. With your lips, make the sound of a snake. Even before you are fully awake, place your bare feet on the floor. Say, Mama is coming, and then creep past the purple glow of the nightlight to where he is a ball in his bed.

Lay your hand on his back.

If the covers have gone astray, or if his brother’s pinwheel feet are in his face, or if he has rolled onto the plastic toy he took to bed — fix it all. Place the covers back beneath his chin. Readjust the brother, put the toy on the shelf, kiss the forehead. Feel your way back through the darkness, over the sleeping dog.

***

Long ago, my parents were spelunkers. They would disappear into a hole in the ground, unsure of where the cave would lead, and pick their way along in the dark, their carbide lights illuminating the stalactites and stalagmites. They insist they felt excitement and possibility.

Once they brought my brother and me to a cave they remembered from college. It was supposed to be a family adventure. Together we would explore, and my parents would remember the way out.

What I recall is the surprising totality of darkness. And the terror I felt when we squeezed through the smallest of passageways. And the solidness — the unmoveableness — of the rock. If I breathed out or turned my shoulders in a certain way, I imagined I could be stuck there forever. If anything were to give, it would not be the rock; it would be my girl-sized bones.

Decades later, I still cannot relax into the dark.
Read more…

Take Two Stem Cell Injections and Don’t Call Me Until After I Cash Your $10,000 Cheque

Stem cell. Getty Images

Getting older? Feeling the aches and pains that come naturally as we age? If someone suggests that stem cells will ease your ills, ask to see some science, and maybe a valid medical license. Stem cell purveyors are popping up all over the United States in a new, “largely unregulated” industry — and they’re charging $5,000 to $10,000 for a single injection.

As Caroline Chen reports as part of a joint investigation by ProPublica and The New Yorker, “Unscientific methods, deceptive marketing, price gouging and disregard for patients’ well-being were rampant across the amniotic stem cell therapy industry.” The investigation “found disgraced doctors who were recast as salespeople, manufacturers that cloaked themselves in pseudoscience and had few scientists on staff, and clinics that offer to treat conditions like multiple sclerosis or kidney disease without specialized training.”

These clinics are multiplying in the United States. According to a tally by Leigh Turner, an associate professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota, there were 12 such clinics advertising to consumers in 2009; in 2017, there were more than 700. Unproven cellular therapies are a $2 billion global business, according to a recent paper co-authored by Massimo Dominici, the lead investigator at the cellular therapy lab at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, in Italy.

They were there to see a presentation by Dr. David Greene, who was introduced as a “retired orthopedic surgeon.” Atlas Medical Center, a local clinic that specializes in pain treatment, hosted the event. Greene, a short, trim man with his hair slicked up, ignored the stage and microphone and stood close to his audience. After warming up the crowd with a joke about his inept golf skills, Greene launched into his sales pitch. A tiny vial no larger than the palm of his hand, he told the group, contains roughly 10 million live stem cells, harvested from the placenta, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord or amnion, the membrane that surrounds the fetus in the womb. Injected into a joint or spine, or delivered intravenously into the bloodstream, Greene told his listeners, those cells could ease whatever ailed them.

On a screen behind him, Greene displayed a densely printed slide with a “small list” of conditions his stem cell product could treat: arthritis, tendinitis, psoriasis, lupus, hair loss, facial wrinkles, scarring, erectile dysfunction, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, ALS, neuropathy, pelvic pain, diabetes, dry eye, macular degeneration, kidney failure. And that was just a sample. “I need to add a couple more slides,” Greene said with a laugh.

Soni told Longo that three more injections were required for him to feel a significant difference, but, by early May, Longo had decided not to seek further treatment, saying that his left knee hadn’t improved any more. “I don’t think the regenerative properties were happening,” Longo said.

Earlier this year, Soni’s Web site displayed the names and faces of a team of clinicians, including a cardiologist, a cosmetologist, a neurologist, and a urologist. None of them were listed on New York State’s license look-up page, and their photos were traced back to stock photo websites.

When initially asked about these specialists, Soni said, “They are all seeing patients for me” and changed the subject. After ProPublica and The New Yorker expressed doubts about the clinicians’ existence to Soni, the names and photos vanished from the website.

Read the story

Critics: Endgame

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 9 minutes (2,309 words)

It’s a strange feeling being a cultural critic at this point in history. It’s like standing on the deck of the Titanic, feeling it sink into the sea, hearing the orchestra play as they go down — then reviewing the show. Yes, it feels that stupid. And useless. And beside the point. But what if, I don’t know, embedded in that review, is a dissection of class hierarchy, of the fact that the players are playing because what else are you supposed to do when you come from the bottom deck? And what if the people left behind with them are galvanized by this knowledge? And what if, I don’t know, one of them does something about it, like stowing away their kids on a rich person’s boat? And what if someone is saved who might otherwise not have been? If art can save your soul, can’t writing about it do something similar?

The climate report, that metaphorical iceberg, hit in October. You know, the one that said we will all be royally screwed by 2040 unless we reduce carbon emissions to nothing. And then came news story after news story, like a stream of crime scene photos — submerged villages, starving animals, bleached reefs — again and again, wave after wave. It all coalesced into the moment David Attenborough — the man famous for narrating documentaries on the wonders of nature — started narrating the earth’s destruction. I heard about that scene in Our Planet, the one where the walruses start falling off the cliffs because there is no ice left to support them, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Just like I couldn’t bring myself to read about the whales failing to reproduce and the millions of people being displaced. As a human being I didn’t know what to do, and as a cultural critic I was just as lost. So when Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation launched “Covering Climate Change: A New Playbook for a 1.5-Degree World,” along with a piece on how to get newsrooms to prioritize the environment, I got excited. Here is the answer, I thought. Finally.

But there was no answer for critics. I had to come up with one myself.

* * *

Four years ago, William S. Smith, soon to be the editor of Art in America, attended the Minneapolis-based conference “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age” and noticed the same strange feeling I mentioned. “The rousing moments when it appeared that artists could be tasked with emergency management and that critics could take on vested interests were, however, offset by a weird — and I would say mistaken — indulgence of powerlessness,” he wrote, recalling one speaker describing “criticism as the ‘appendix’ of the art world; it could easily be removed without damaging the overall system.” According to CJR, arts criticism has been expiring at a faster rate than newspapers themselves (is that even possible?). And when your job is devalued so steadily by the industry, it’s hard not to internalize. In these precarious circumstances, exercising any power, let alone taking it on, starts to feel Herculean.

Last week’s bloody battle — not that one — was only the latest reminder of critics’ growing insignificance. In response to several celebrities questioning their profession, beleaguered critics who might have proven they still matter by addressing larger, more urgent issues, instead made their critics’ point by making it all about themselves. First there was Saturday Night Live writer Michael Che denigrating Uproxx writer Steven Hyden on Instagram for critiquing Che’s Weekend Update partner Colin Jost. Then there was Lizzo tweeting that music reviewers should be “unemployed” after a mixed Pitchfork review. And finally, Ariana Grande calling out “all them blogs” after an E! host criticized Justin Bieber’s performance during her show. Various wounded critics responded in kind, complaining that people with so much more clout were using it to devalue them even more than they already have been. “It’s doubtful, for instance, that Lizzo or Grande would have received such blowback if they hadn’t invoked the specter of joblessness in a rapidly deteriorating industry,” wrote Alison Herman at The Ringer, adding, “They’re channeling a deeply troubling trend in how the public exaggerates media members’ power, just as that power — such as it is — has never been less secure.” 

That was the refrain of the weeklong collective wound-lick: “We’re just doing our jobs.” But it all came to a head when Olivia Munn attacked Go Fug Yourself, the fashion criti-comic blog she misconstrued as objectifying snark. “Red carpet fashion is a big business and an art form like any other, and as such there is room to critique it,” site owners Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan responded, while a number of other critics seized the moment to redefine their own jobs, invoking the anti-media stance of the current administration to convey the gravity of misinterpreting their real function, which they idealized beyond reproach. At Vanity Fair, chief critic Richard Lawson wrote of his ilk offering “a vital counterbalance in whatever kind of cultural discourse we’re still able to have.” The Ringer’s Herman added that criticism includes “advocacy and the provision of context in addition to straightforward pans,” while Caroline Framke at Variety simply said, “Real critics want to move a conversation forward.” Wow, it almost makes you want to be one.

I understand the impulse to lean into idolatry in order to underscore the importance of criticism. Though it dates back as far as art itself, the modern conception of the critic finds its roots in 18th-century Europe, in underground socially aware critiques of newly arrived public art. U.K. artist James Bridle summed up this modern approach at “Superscript,” when he argued that the job of art is “to disrupt and complicate” society, adding, “I don’t see how criticism can function without making the same level of demands and responding to the same challenges as art itself — in a form of solidarity, but also for its own survival.” Despite this unifying objective, it’s important to be honest about what in actual practice passes for criticism these days (and not only in light of the time wasted by critics defending themselves). A lot of it — a lot — kowtows to fandom. And not just within individual reviews, but in terms of what is covered; “criticism” has largely become a publicity-fueled shill of the most high-profile popular culture. The positivity is so pervasive that the odd evisceration of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, for instance, becomes cause for communal rejoicing. An element of much of this polarized approach is an auteur-style analysis that treats each subject like a hermetically sealed objet d’art that has little interaction with the world.

The rare disruption these days tends to come from — you guessed it — writers of color, from K. Austin Collins turning a Green Book review into a meditation on the erasure of black history to Doreen St. Felix’s deconstruction of a National Geographic cover story into the erasure of a black future. This is criticism which does not just wrestle with the work, but also wrestles with the work within the world, parsing the way it reflects, feeds, fights — or none of the above — the various intersections of our circumstances. “For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race,” the Pulitzer committee announced in awarding New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als in 2017. A year later the prize for feature writing went to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, the one freelancer among the nominated staffers, for a GQ feature on Dylann Roof. Profiling everyone from Dave Chappelle to Missy Elliott, Ghansah situates popular culture within the present, the past, the personal, the political — everywhere, really. And this is what the best cultural criticism does. It takes the art and everything around it, and it reckons with all of that together.

But the discourse around art has not often included climate change, barring work which specifically addresses it. Following recent movements that have awoken the general populace to various systemic inequities, we have been slowly shifting toward an awareness of how those inequities inform contemporary popular culture. This has manifested in criticism with varying levels of success, from clunky references to Trump to more considered analyses of how historic disparity is reflected in the stories that are currently told. And while there has been an expansion in representation in the arts as a result, the underlying reality of these systemic shifts is that they don’t fundamentally affect the bottom line of those in power. There is a social acceptability to these adaptations, one which does not ask the 1 Percent to confront its very existence, ending up subsumed under it instead. A more threatening prospect would be reconsidering climate change, which would also involve reconsidering the economy — and the people who benefit from it the most.  

We are increasingly viewing extreme wealth not as success but as inequity — Disney’s billion-dollar opening weekend with Avengers: Endgame was undercut not only by critics who questioned lauding a company that is cannibalizing the entertainment industry, but by Bernie Sanders: “What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million — over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes.” More pertinent, however, is how environmentally sustainable these increasingly elaborate productions are. I am referring to not only literal productions, involving sets and shoots, but everything that goes into making and distributing any kind of art. (That includes publicity — what do you think the carbon footprint of BTS is?) In 2006, a report conducted by UCLA found that the film and television industries contributed more to air pollution in the region than almost all five of the other sectors studied. “From the environmental impact estimates, greenhouse gas emissions are clearly an area where the motion picture industry can be considered a significant contributor,” it stated, concluding, “it is clear that very few people in the industry are actively engaged with greenhouse gas emission reduction, or even with discussions of the issue.”

The same way identity politics has taken root in the critic’s psyche, informing the writing we do, so too must climate change. Establishing a sort of cultural carbon footprint will perhaps encourage outlets not to waste time hiring fans to write outdated consumers reviews that do no traffic in Rotten Tomatoes times. Instead of distracting readers with generic takes, they might shift their focus to the specifics of, for instance, an environmental narrative, such as the one in the lame 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which has since proven itself to be (if nothing else) a useful illustration of how climate change can blow cold as well as hot. While Game of Thrones also claimed a climate-driven plot, one wonders whether, like the aforementioned Jake Gyllenhaal blockbuster, the production planted $200,000 worth of trees to offset the several thousand tons of carbon dioxide it emitted. If the planet is on our minds, perhaps we will also feature Greta Thunberg in glossy magazines instead of Bari Weiss or Kellyanne Conway. Last year, The New York Times’ chief film critic, A.O. Scott, who devoted an entire book to criticism, wrote, “No reader will agree with a critic all the time, and no critic requires obedience or assent from readers. What we do hope for is trust. We try to earn it through the quality of our writing and the clarity of our thought, and by telling the truth.” And the most salient truth of all right now is that there is no art if the world doesn’t exist.

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I am aware that I’m on one of the upper decks of this sinking ship. I have a contract with Longreads, which puts me somewhere in the lower middle class (that may sound unimpressive, but writers have a low bar). Perhaps even better than that, I work for a publication for which page views are not the driving force, so I can write to importance rather than trends. I am aware, also, that a number of writers do not have this luxury, but misrepresenting themselves as the vanguards of criticism not only does them a disservice but also discredits the remaining thoughtful discourse around art. A number of critics, however, are positioned better than me. Yet they personalize the existential question into one that is merely about criticism when the real question is wider: It’s about criticism in the world.

I am not saying that climate change must be shoehorned into every article‚ though even a non sequitur would be better than nothing — but I am saying that just as identity politics is now a consideration when we write, our planet should be too. What I am asking for is simply a widening of perspective, besides economics, besides race, beyond all things human, toward a cultural carbon footprint, one which becomes part of the DNA of our critiques and determines what we choose to talk about and what we say when we do. After more than 60 years of doing virtually the same thing, even nonagenarian David Attenborough knew he had to change tacks; it wasn’t enough just to show the loss of natural beauty, he had to point out how it affects us directly. As he told the International Monetary Fund last month: “We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.” In Our Planet, Attenborough reminds us over and over that our survival depends on the earth’s. For criticism to survive, it must remind us just as readily.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Liberation: a Love Story (and a Reckoning)

Getty, Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Wong | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,187 words)

As a relationship therapist, I know a lot about love, loss, repair, endurance, and growth. Of course, I was trained for this. But the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned came from my grandparents, who taught me nearly everything there is to know about these things.

That is, until one evening three years ago that left me to question everything they taught me.

That night, I’m drawing a bath for my young daughters when my phone dings. As the water runs, I look and see that it’s a forwarded email from my mother, a message from one of my father’s long removed cousins — the daughter of my grandfather’s estranged brother. The email is about my grandfather’s dark side, a part of him I knew nothing about.

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The Age of Forever Crises

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Efrem Lukatsky / AP, Illustration by Homestead

Linda Kinstler | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,527 words)

How does one recognize catastrophe, when it comes? What does it look like, how does it sound and smell? If it is an invisible catastrophe, how can you know when you are near it, and when you are far away? And what if it is an everlasting catastrophe, a disaster with a long half-life, so no matter how much time passes, it never quite goes away, and in some places, it only grows stronger? And when a decision from on high announces that it is time to try to move past it, to lay a wreath and get on with life, how does one mark the anniversary of a disaster still in motion, a crisis without end?

Last week marked yet another anniversary of the explosion of the Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station’s Reactor No. 4. Thirty-three years ago, in the early hours of the morning on April 26, 1986, an ill-fated safety test unleashed an explosion equivalent to sixty tons of TNT, obliterating the reactor and sending the contents of its core — uranium fuel, graphite, zirconium, and a noxious mixture of radioactive gases — into the surrounding air, water, and earth. Read more…