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The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

Longreads Pick

“Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. But then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable — for a long time, no one could make sense of it.”

Source: Wired
Published: Apr 14, 2020
Length: 28 minutes (7,112 words)

Escaping Coronavirus Lockdown Through a Stranger’s Solitary Walks on YouTube

From Sakura in snow - walking in snowy Saitama / Rambalac / YouTube, Photo illustration by Longreads

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | April 2020 | 25 minutes (6,184 words)

 

As one of the millions of people currently trapped inside their homes thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, wondering if the virus will still get them, I need an escape, not only from the trying monotony of indoor life in cramped quarters parenting a toddler who seems increasingly aware that something is wrong, but from the anxiety as well.

I worry constantly: about my 2-year old daughter; about my wife; my health; my job; my aged parents; the effect that broken social bonds will have on children’s development. I also worry about what medical professionals like my wife call “the surge.” We Americans hunker indoors waiting for the virus to decimate our communities like it has Italy’s, and for the bodies to fill graves that few people would want to dig. The tension of anticipation gnaws at you, leaving a pit in your stomach that no amount of gardening or strong cocktails can fill.

There is no actual escape from reality. What I crave is a brief psychological break at the end of these long days, which spring keeps making longer and longer. Sleep is the only real break; yet sleep is something anxiety is allowing me less and less of. So at night, after my wife Rebekah and I bathe and put Vivian to bed at 7:30, we want some quiet time. Sometimes I skate the vacant streets for 30 minutes. Sometimes I listen to music on headphones the way I did as a teen. Then Rebekah and I slouch on our living room couch doing work, replying to emails, and reading news. If there’s time left, we watch TV in our basement.

Wi-Fi provides the homebound masses instant COVID information. Zoom allows us to work remotely. Now a popular, hypnotic Japanese YouTube series provides me the chance for international travel and a reliable psychological escape during this time of limited mobility. In each episode, an unidentified man films the streets as he walks through Japanese cities for hours at a time. He calls himself Rambalac. He calls his episodes videowalks. He uses a high-definition handheld camera mounted on a stabilizer, and captures ambient noise with his Audio-Technica AT9946CM microphone. Filmed both day and night, his walking series started in Tokyo in 2017 but expanded to other cities, the suburbs, and countryside. His videowalks have very literal titles like “Walking in rainy Mizuho city by Clannad trail” and “Walking without reason in rainy Omuta, Kyushu.” His videos state: “Not a vlog, no intrusive faces or talking, pure Japan only.”

I know very little about photography or cinematography, but I could identify some of the effective elements of his technique. He employs no fancy camera work. No splicing, no zooming in and out, no disorienting panning or wobbling. He keeps the camera still and mostly aimed ahead. Sometimes he pivots to capture a broader scene or something he finds interesting, like a sign or river or view. There’s no music, no commentary, no narration, only his location’s ordinary noise. This is why his videos are so absorbing: He turns his viewers into his eyes, letting them see what they’d see if they were walking with him. It’s virtual reality tourism, lacking only touch and smell.

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‘Let’s Reset’: A Career Social Distancer Mends Some Fences

Sari Botton | Longreads | April 2020 | 6 minutes (1,521 words)

To appreciate the significance of the shift I’m about to share with you, it helps to know a couple of things about me.

The first is that I’ve harbored a lifelong aversion to the telephone, which stands in stark contrast to my family’s enthusiasm for it. For the entirety of my adult life, my mother and sister have spoken to each other five or more times daily, and in between chatted with countless friends and other family members. They roll seamlessly from one conversation to the next while I cower the second my muted iPhone starts vibrating, and have worked hard at Ferberizing my mom so she expects only a couple of calls from me per week.

If I were to self-diagnose I’d say my problem is rooted in lonerish introversion (a condition I’ve learned to over-compensate for; I now pass as a full-fledged extrovert), and a social anxiety that stems from my teen years when, even though I begged to have a pale yellow princess phone installed in my bedroom so I could make myself available to my friends and crushes, I dreaded actually talking to them. What if there were awkward silences I didn’t know how to fill? What if I said the wrong thing? What if, without visual cues, I spoke at the wrong time, stepping on a cute boy’s lines?

The second is my long-standing antipathy toward a group I’ve dubbed The Forgiveness Lobby — that well-meaning but preachy band of folks who, to my mind, short-circuit a multi-step process best given ample time. You know the ones — always posting platitudes such as “Holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” They pressure the aggrieved into relinquishing appropriate anger well before they’re ready — and before those who’ve aggrieved them have had sufficient opportunity to suffer the consequences of their actions, and come around to making amends. I’m all for genuine forgiveness, but that is something which must unfold at its own pace.

So imagine my surprise when, a week into social distancing thanks to Coronavirus, I suddenly wanted to call or Facetime with absolutely everyone, especially a handful of people I’d previously fallen out with, so we could bury our hatchets, large and small.

Maybe it was the void created by the sudden absence of friends I’m used to spending time with IRL — and the colleagues I used to work with side-by-side in the small co-working space I operated, which Coronavirus has forced me to shutter. Maybe it was the death toll, mounting daily, reminding me of my mortality and everyone else’s. Maybe it was the arrival of a mutual enemy, which has made it easier to bond with those I’ve been at odds with. Whatever the cause, I quickly found myself emailing people, asking for appointments to talk on the phone so we could start over. (What kind of monster just calls people out of the blue without any warning? Okay, okay — some friends have recently done this and I kind of…loved it…? Who even is Pandemic Sari?)

Of course, there have been exceptions, people toward whom I am not feeling terribly generous, even in my newfound state of grace. There’s the underminer/boundary-pusher I’ve been trying to shake for going on 40 years, who keeps resurfacing no matter how fervently I try to avoid her. There are exes I am resigned never to speak to again — unless, of course, they come forth with long overdue apologies. Until such time, I am standing on ceremony, deadly plague be damned.

But for a few notable others, I am all about rapprochement right now.
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The Messy Making of a Nearly Perfect Hip-Hop Album

Al Pereira/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

Twenty-five years after its release, Ol’ Diry Bastard’s solo debut Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version still sounds as fresh as ever. Hip-hop rewrote the musical language and pushed the limits of the English language the way only truly revolutionary art can. Then ODB came along and reinvented hip-hop. For Pitchfork’s weeky Sunday Review, writer Sheldon Pearce revisits Ol Dirty’s musical masterpiece.

As his Wu-Tang band-member Method Man said, “there was no father to ODB’s style: Without musical precedents, he leaned into aberration.” His original style came partly from being an unpredictable personality, and that meant an unpredictable life. “The album took nearly two years to make,” Pearce writes in his review, “because of this fitful approach. ODB was surrounded by a small team doing its damndest to keep him recording, but he could not be collected and he would not be…” Pearce awards ODB’s album a 9.3 on Pitchfork’s 10-point scale. I’d go further and say it’s perfect. I’d also rank Pearce’s review-essay at a perfect 10. This is what the best music writing looks like: incisive, lively, revealing, surprising, words deserving of their subject.

Those methods required several measures to wring an entire album out of Dirty. RZA was the hands-off architect. Buddha Monk was the handler, body man, and engineer, tasked with getting ODB prepped and into the studio, and making sure his vocals sounded right. Mastering engineer Tom Coyne was dubbed “the referee” in the liner notes for breaking up fights. Elektra A&R Dante Ross had the demanding task of shepherding the album to completion amid chaos. “I knew I had to get it to the finish line because there are times in life when you know you only have that moment in time, and you gotta get there,” Ross said of the Dirty Version sessions. “I had to get there, ’cause I strongly suspected that would not happen again.”

ODB’s volatility created only a small window for capturing his output. He was anti-prolific, so inefficient in his recording style that it made The Dirty Version even more of a marvel—not just catching lightning in a bottle but harnessing its electricity to power a generator. It’s impossible to overstate how much his jolting vocals jump out and strike you. On “Don’t U Know,” he lurches along, his singing barely adhering to melody and meter. On “Hippa to da Hoppa,” he punctuates every bar with a grunt, then becomes conversational, then does some straight-up showerhead crooning. Across chest-thumpers like “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Cuttin’ Headz,” he becomes a caricature, a monster of pure id born of New York City’s sordid underbelly.

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The Danger of Desire

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Faylita Hicks | Longreads | April 2020 | 28 minutes (7,041 words)

I was late. Even though the album dropped in 2018, I didn’t know about the track until June of the next year. Which was tragic, because the first time I heard Teyana Taylor’s “WTP (Work This Pussy)” — I went off.

The command hit my speaker and I dropped the washrag I had been using to clean the dishes, into the soapy water. Splashing it all over the frail kitchen counter, I leaned forward over the sink. Gripped its metal edge in instinctive obedience, desire trickling through my body electric. Throwing my head back, I left behind the part of my day that had been filled with judges, sheriffs, the DA. I turned the music up, grinding my pelvis to the tempo, shuddering in spasmodic rhythm to twerk.

I wanted to shake out the fear I had carried since that afternoon’s Criminal Justice Committee meeting with the county officials. Forget all about the Black and Brown bodies that slept in a small metal box less than five miles away from me. Swaying from side to side with my eyes closed, I let guiltless memories of pleasure snap neon through me. Let holographic echoes of my past life — the time before I was an activist and after I was a Christian — fill to the brim the dusty corners of my small and empty Central Texas apartment. Hot, I rode the hum that rolled out from my bluetooth speakers, ignoring the sound of my phone vibrating with updates from the group chat about bail. All I wanted was to make my lower back flinch as I rolled my hips and popped to Teyana’s simple instructions — work this pussy, work this pussy, work this pussy.

But I must’ve been too tired. Too tight in the shoulders to flex and hold the pose. Too thick in the thighs now to dip low and pounce back up with ease. Too heavy with the backhanded comments about criminals and “bad decisions.” Too dizzy from the tight, bone-straight lace front that had made me feel more pretty in a room full of white. Too distracted. Too hurt. Too tired. Like trying to shake molasses off of me, I rotated my hips in place. But nothing moved as easily as it used to. My rhythm was off — and it made me wonder. How long had it been since my back was blown out?
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Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

Longreads Pick

Personal volatility and musical unpredictability merged in the hip-hop artist known as ODB, and with time and help capturing the lightning in the bottle, he focused his singular style into a hip-hop masterpiece.

Source: Pitchfork
Published: Mar 29, 2020
Length: 10 minutes (2,558 words)

“The Leaky Vessel”: On Lewis Carroll and the Perils of Being Female

Rachel Vorona Cote (Author photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)

Rachel Vorona Cote | Longreads | March 2020 | 10 minutes (2,706 words)

We’re delighted to bring you a brief excerpt from “Chatterbox” — chapter 2 of Rachel Vorona Cote’s excellent book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today.

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We’ve been fortunate to publish Rachel Vorona Cote in the past. Check out The Fraught Culture of Online Mourning, and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Exhilarating, Emotionally Intelligent Pop Music.

The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).
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What Does a Post-Apocalyptic Gated Community Look Like?

bunkers south dakota
Chris Huber / Rapid City Journal via AP

In trying times, many of us gravitate to escapist cultural consumption — think Seth Rogen watching Cats for the first time while very, very high. You’d assume that a story about mid-market post-apocalyptic bunkers in South Dakota would be the last thing to fit that bill, yet I somehow found Mark O’Connell’s excerpt on that very topic, in The Guardian, oddly soothing.

The piece takes great pleasure in describing the obvious folly of the enterprise — how could it not? (I kept wondering: all these communities would depend on contracted armed forces for protection, but what would stop these mercenaries from killing their wealthy overlords and taking over all the fancy dry foods in their underground pantries?) But it also shows how this absurd concept is, in fact, a very natural next step for a society that largely refuses to act as one.

The place was, I read on the company’s website, “strategically and centrally located in one of the safest areas of North America”, at an altitude of about 1,200 metres and 100 miles from the nearest known military nuclear targets. “Vivos security team can spot anyone approaching the property from three miles away. Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated. Private. Defensible. Off-Grid. Centrally located.” It was not intuitively clear to me how a place could be both isolated and centrally located, but, to be fair, if pretty much the entire rest of the world had perished, any settlement of living humans would have legitimate grounds to proclaim itself centrally located.

Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers and turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders — the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared — and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bare rightwing essentials: a militarised security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.

End-time real estate was an increasingly competitive racket. On the website of one major purveyor of luxury apocalypse solutions, Trident Lakes, I read that in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological emergency, the properties would be sealed by automatic airlocks and blast doors, and that each would be connected via a network of tunnels to an underground community centre featuring dry food storage, DNA vaults, fully equipped exercise rooms and meeting areas. The promotional blurb also promised such features as a retail district, an equestrian centre and polo field, an 18-hole golf course and a driving range.

This was a new entry into the canon of apocalyptic scenarios: bankers and hedge-fund managers, tanned and relaxed, taking the collapse of civilisation as an opportunity to spend some time on the links, while a heavily armed private police force roamed the perimeter in search of intruders. All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.

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On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

 

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely.  Read more…

The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.

“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”

I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…