Search Results for: Nature

The Queering of the Baby Bells

Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio

Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 |  23 minutes (6,272 words)

 

In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)

One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.

Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…

Wonderful Things: The Kid Creole and the Coconuts Story

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Michael A. Gonzales| Longreads | December 2019 | 31 minutes (6,214 words)

 

As New York City wallowed in social and economic disarray during the early 1980s, music still ruled supreme. The boom bap of rap bubbled in the outer boroughs, and dance DJs delivered their sonic sermons at clubs like Better Days and Paradise Garage. A cluster of recording studios in Midtown Manhattan became the sound factories of choice for top-tier projects. There was the Power Station, where Chic and Luther Vandross recorded, and Plaza Sound Studios, where Blondie and the Ramones worked. Meanwhile, engineer Bob Blank opened Blank Tape Studios in 1975 at 37 West 20th Street. Catering to recording artists who had less money but still sought quality sound, Blank Tape was housed in a building that was occupied by photographers and fashion manufacturing, but the studio soon became popular among offbeat artists such as Arthur Russell, The B-52s, and Talking Heads.

“Not necessarily because we wanted to be offbeat in the beginning, but because we were so off the beaten track in the New York City studio scene at the time,” Blank said in 2009, “the only people who would walk through our door were the people who couldn’t get uptown into the big studios.” The studio earned a reputation among listeners. In the Village Voice in 2010, writer Andy Beta wrote, “The label credit ‘Recorded at Blank Tapes’ triggers the same reverence that ‘Van Gelder Studio’ inspires in jazz heads or ‘Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals’ suggests to soul aficionados — a sure sign that whoever the artist and whatever the cut, it’s worth a listen.”

Read more…

‘They Were Growing Seedlings…Which Would Sprout To Become Supreme Court Justices’

Hope Reese | Longreads | December 2019 | 17 minutes (4,511 words)

 

When Donald Trump was running for President in 2016, he had a problem: many conservatives weren’t convinced that he would be conservative enough. He had changed party affiliations five times, only committing himself –– albeit, loosely –– as a Republican in 2012. He had even supported gay marriage.

“Evangelicals and social conservatives didn’t trust him,” Ruth Marcus, Washington Post editor and columnist told me.

Marcus, whose book Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover details the intricate process whereby Republicans cemented a conservative Supreme Court, points to Trump’s “innovation” –– a public list, unprecedented, of Supreme Court justices he would choose from –– as the key to Trump’s victory.

The point was to “tell social conservatives that notwithstanding their taste for a thrice-married, once-Democratic New Yorker, they could trust him to fill the Supreme Court with reliable conservatives,” Marcus says.

In Supreme Ambition, Marcus, who writes an op-ed column for the Post and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2007 for Commentary, offers a thorough look at how Kavanaugh made it onto the list –– he wasn’t originally there –– through a strong support network, and the messy hearings that ensued after Christine Blasey Ford came forward with allegations of sexual assault. Marcus is particularly critical of Congress’s handling of the situation –– the refusal to pursue leads, the botched FBI investigation, and the political concerns that infected the nomination process. Read more…

The Great White Nope

Marco Livolsi / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  12 minutes (2,912 words)

I wouldn’t call Canada racist. I’m not being nice when I say that, I’m being polite. Canadians are like that. That kind of polite where you hear a racial slur and pretend it didn’t happen. Or you see some bro get too close to a woman and you walk right by because it’s not your affair. This is not a confrontational country. I remember one recent Toronto subway ride where a white workman fresh off some job site, boots muddy, reflector bib on, interrupted two men — one brown, one white — who were about to brawl. You could feel the entire car getting progressively more tense as their voices escalated. But the workman got between them. “Come on guys, we’re all tired. Chill,” he said. And they did. And when it was my turn to get off, I thanked him. “It’s just what you do,” he said. I assume he was from out of town.

With all the free health care, the gun control, the less-extreme wealth disparity, Canadians can convince themselves that they’re superior to Americans. But none of that makes them any less racist, it just makes the racism easier to overlook; with a country that does so many things right, how can they be wrong? Our media is a microcosm of this denial, a lesson in what happens when your industry contracts to a handful of major newspapers and magazines, one major national broadcasting corporation, a smattering of websites, and one watchdog — and is only getting smaller. More than one fifth of Canada’s population is made up of people of color, but the popular press acknowledges that about as much as it acknowledges that the industry itself is overpoweringly white. The result is a media landscape that is overwhelmingly conservative — politically, and in every other way — and overwhelmingly lacking in perspective about it.

Outside of broadcasting, our newsrooms are supposed to self-regulate and yet there are no — zero — updated reports on their demographics. But a new study published by The Conversation last month analyzed two decades of the country’s three biggest newspapers, looking specifically at news and politics op-ed pages where journalists’ identities are clear. “Over the 21 years, as the proportion of white people in Canada’s population declined, the representation of white columnists increased,” Asmaa Malik and Sonya Fatah reported. Since 2016, whites have been overrepresented by 11 percent in these newsrooms. As Maclean’s Andray Domise, long one of the few black columnists in the country, writes, “Too many of my white colleagues in journalism still seem to believe their profession and the assumed stance of objectivity places them at a distance from white supremacy.” That these journalists can’t see their own means they can’t see anyone else’s. This is why I don’t work in Canadian media. It doesn’t really see me or anyone else who isn’t white.

* * *

I was genuinely shocked to get this job. I had written one story for Longreads — fittingly, a reported feature about Justin Bieber’s vacillation between Canada and America — and a few months later, the site’s editor called me from New York and offered me a weekly column. For most of the phone call I was confused. I think I literally said, “So this is an actual job?” I didn’t understand how this could happen. Thirteen years into a journalism career and I had never once been handed anything. Not even one story. I was inured to 13 more years of proving myself over and over and over again, even with the same editors at the same publications. And yet this guy had decided, after I had only written once for his site, that I deserved an actual job. That would NEVER happen to me in Canada. It HAS never happened to me in Canada.

In a now 14-year media career, I’ve landed 14 job interviews in Canada (that I can remember) and only once secured a position. I was repeatedly told not to take it personally, but from my first internship on, it’s been Sisyphean. I was recently told by an old journalism professor, unprompted, that I was one of my graduating year’s most promising, but the industry kept insinuating the opposite. I just assumed the white guys in my class, and a good number of the white girls, were getting jobs because they were exponentially better than me. I wrote for white editor after white editor, met with white exec after white exec, and nothing seemed to stick. Not too long ago, a friend of mine at the CBC — an older white guy — helped me get a job interview, which went well … until it veered into the details of my Pakistani history. Another (white) editor asked me to coffee, invited me to pitch, and never took anything I did, while their (white) spouse continued to appear prominently in their pages. Yet another group of editors, all white, declined to give me a job (which went to a white journalist), then offered me a short series of articles — about race, obviously — one of which they mismanaged so badly that we never worked together again. One major newspaper commissioned so many features from me in a row that I asked my editor to be made a permanent employee; they tried to lower my rate instead. As the years passed, I watched white woman after white woman, younger, less experienced, get staff job after staff job and thought: Oh, shit, do I just suck?

Canadian media is designed so that journalists of color give up. In 2017, black columnist Desmond Cole loudly resigned from The Toronto Star, having had his space reduced and his activism questioned. “My contributions to the Star are in sharp contrast with the lack of tenure, exposure, support, and compensation I have received in return,” he wrote on his blog. (Cole’s first book, The Skin We’re In, is out next year). Also in 2017, freelance journalist Septembre Anderson revealed she had given up journalism and was turning to web development after hitting her head against a walled-off industry for seven years. “Racialized voices just aren’t being heard,” she wrote in Torontoist. “They aren’t making decisions nor are they carrying them out.” In 2018, The Globe and Mail reporter Sunny Dhillon also resigned, despite having nothing else lined up. “I have worked as a journalist in this country for the last decade and with the solutions as obvious as they are unacted upon — hire more people of color, hear their voices, elevate them to positions of power or prominence — I cannot say I am particularly optimistic,” he wrote on Medium. Shriveling newsrooms usually shed their newest, usually more-marginalized staffers first, but a 2017 Public Policy Forum report on Canadian media questioned “exactly how many jobs have been lost in journalism — and how much frustrated talent has fled.”

I’m still in journalism not because of Canadian media but in spite of it. It was the editors outside of the country who hired me for their newsrooms: as a film and art editor at Time Out Dubai, as an entertainment editor at The New York Daily News. In Canada, it was the women who threw me a bone, mostly freelance assignments (though one woman actually hired me as an editor for AOL Canada). To fill in the blanks — too many to count — there was my mother. Because as much as this is about media with a dearth of opportunities for nonwhite journalists, it is about which journalists have the financial support to keep going anyway. Early last month, an Excel sheet circulated in which a number of American journalists anonymously revealed their salaries. Most of the journalists were white, and many of them reported wages too meager to survive on in the big cities where they were living. A number of people noted the discrepancy and wondered what kind of financial support these journalists were getting from their families that so many people of color were not.

So here it is: I am a woman of color and my mother is the reason I could do an unpaid internship in California, which got me my first job, which got me my second job, which got me my third — and, in between, she floated me when I couldn’t quite make ends meet. I wasn’t living off of her, but she was keeping me alive. On the one hand you could call her a patron, on the other hand she’s a vexing reminder to a number of journalists who are probably better than me that they do not have this extra support — a disproportionate number of whom are people of color like me. An extreme version of this leg up, of course, is nepotism, something I have not experienced but that so many white journalists in Canada have. Highly positioned media people whose families are also highly positioned in media, include: Toronto Life editor in chief Sarah Fulford, whose father, journalist Robert Fulford, has the order of Canada; former Walrus editor in chief Jonathan Kay, whose mother is National Post columnist Barbara kay; not to mention all those CBC staffers’ spouses who secured CBC contracts.

In September, the publicly funded Canadian educational channel TVO aired an episode of current affairs program The Agenda with Steve Paikin, asking, “Is Canadian Media Losing Its Touch?” The panel was made up of Paikin, who is white, and two other journalists, a man and a woman, both also white. All three of them focused on the shrinking industry, never once mentioning its racism. But just three months prior, several mainstream media organizations were excoriated for belittling the landmark National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Final Report, the more-than-1,000-page document of 2,000+ testimonials outlining how colonialism in Canada has systematically destroyed First Nations communities. Instead of white Canadians grappling with the country’s long-awaited admission that they not only live on stolen land but have also helped decimate the people to whom Canada actually belongs, they diverted attention to the term “genocide.” Canada’s two largest newspapers, the Globe and the Star, published board-wide editorials denying those three syllables, while the Post had a Catholic priest doing the same. As journalist Justin Brake tweeted: “Colonialism is ubiquitous. Even in journalism.”

That was already clear two years ago when the (now ex-)editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine, in an issue meant to celebrate Indigenous writing, called for white journalists to aspire to a nonexistent “cultural appropriation prize” in order to enrich their work. In response, high-ranking members of the country’s leading media companies — the Post, Maclean’s, CBC, Rogers — offered cash for its coffers. More recently, there have been several incidences in which newsroom photographs have circulated on social media showing a sea of white faces. In October, the Globe was sideeyed for hiring a white woman, Robyn Urback, from the CBC to add to its prodigiously white team — reporter Robyn Doolittle quipped, “Robyn, I look forward to everyone confusing us in the years to come.” — which only got whiter once Indo-Caribbean columnist Denise Balkissoon left earlier this month for a higher-ranking position at Chatelaine magazine.

“Since working my first paid jobs as a journalist in 2007, I have been constantly told, explicitly and implicitly, that nobody will care about stories about people who are elderly, Aboriginal, racialized, queer, living with a disability or chronic health condition, or living with an active addiction or mental health concern,” University of British Colombia writing instructor and former magazine editor Jackie Wong told rabble.ca in 2016. This irresponsible coverage is being predominantly identified by journalists of color, who are also the ones principally assigned to write racialized articles. The Star’s Tanya Talaga has named the requirement to constantly advocate for and be a workplace’s symbol of diversity “the invisible workload.” Journalists of color are often siloed into multicultural media spaces like the Aboriginal People’s Television Network or smaller publications. Vicky Mochama, now the culture, society, and critical race editor for The Conversation, had a column for Metro until 2018, while Sarah Hagi wrote for Vice until she didn’t, then a site called Freshdaily, until it unceremoniously dumped its entire editorial staff after two weeks. Meanwhile, Kyrell Grant, the freelance writer and Twitter deity who coined the term “big dick energy,” occasionally publishes in places like Vice. “Black women are consistently thought leaders whose uncited ideas regularly appear in mainstream media,” Anderson wrote in Torontoist, “but it’s increasingly apparent that our bylines don’t.”

White journalists, meanwhile, are increasingly insulated from critique. Maclean’s’ Domise apologized for being a gatekeeper, for instance, while those who actually created the gate to keep the likes of him out remain silent. It’s virtually impossible to fix the problem in mainstream Canadian media because it won’t even acknowledge that there is one. What it will do is apologize for suggesting that white people could be at fault for anything. Last month, correspondent Jessica Allen of The Social (Canada’s The View) was forced to apologize for saying hockey players tended to be white and tended to be bullies, both of which are true. “We would like to apologize to everyone who was offended by the remarks,” CTV announced in a statement. In a recent interview with the newsletter Study Hall, BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul admitted she was professionally ostracized after she tweeted in 2016 that BuzzFeed Canada was looking for pitches, particularly from “not white and not male” writers: “I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with executive-level editors in Canada who wouldn’t work with me because they thought I was racist against white people.” Koul now works in New York.

* * *

I suppose it follows that my favorite place to work in Canada is not in fact a media company. Hazlitt is an online literary magazine run by a publishing company, Penguin Random House, and its long-form nonfiction skews experimental. It’s probably no coincidence that Hazlitt is where Koul got her start and where plenty of other people of color like me can write long, rambling essays on the nature of everything, something a media landscape as homogenous as Canada’s has no appetite for. Both of the editors I worked with — the editor in chief and senior editor — are white, but they’re what you might call allies if you’re so inclined, and they understand writing at a molecular level. Hazlitt is equivalent to a magazine like The Believer or a site like Grantland. It’s there that I got my only National Magazine Award nomination in 2016. But the site is small, and you can’t live off it. My job search to supplement my work there included a failed  interview to write news for an elevator screen and naming 500 color swatches for a marketing company. Then Longreads called. Did I mention the guy who hired me is not white?

I’m not really sure what to say to Canadian journalists of color who don’t have that opportunity or the support to create it. Because it’s not really about them. It’s about the white Canadians who are hogging all the power positions and refusing to admit that, let alone step aside. It’s about their refusal to make it a priority to hire people of color from top to bottom because they refuse to see these journalists’ absence as an issue. Domise has credited his column at Maclean’s to a “handful of editors” who recognized the magazine’s lack of diversity. But the columnists around him are still majority white. Our media seems to have a really hard time reflecting 20 percent of our population, of not overrepresenting whiteness to the point of implying its supremacy.

In June, the CBC and Radio-Canada announced that by 2025, they would have at least one non-white person working as a key creative — producer, director, writer, showrunner, lead performer — on each of their programs. One. More recently, a friend who works at one of the bigger media companies in Toronto mentioned that they were hiring but that all of the applications “sucked.” Knowing the number of journalists who have lost their jobs over the past 10 years, I was baffled. Considering the same white people are often shuffled around the industry over and over again, I asked if they had gone beyond submitted applications to ask peers, to check social media, to look into other publications that have recently closed down. My friend looked at me in embarrassment. That’s the look that I think every white journalist in this country is missing. 

Canada is racist: there I said it. My country is racist and its media is racist and its journalists are racist. Not saying it doesn’t make it any less true. Canada is multicultural, yes, that doesn’t mean its media is; the industry that is supposed to inform this country is whitewashed, and its information is whitewashed too. Politically, socially, economically — in every way — Canada misrepresents itself. What results is an entirely misinformed public but, more than that, a public represented by an industry that cloaks itself in white and believes that saying nothing will make it invisible. You’re not invisible. You may not see us, but we see you.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

All Hail the Rat King

Illustration by David Huang

Adrian Daub | Longreads | December 2019 | 16 minutes (3,994 words)

 

The small community of Dellfeld lies amid rolling hills and leafy forests in the extreme south of Germany’s Palatinate region. Ruined castles dot the landscape. Some are impressive stalactites: you can still trace the outlines of a crumbled keep. Others are barely more than colossal piles of stone, their sandstone further melting into the landscape with every rainstorm.

In April 1895, a certain Herr Mayer found a very different kind of relic in a barn attached to Dellfeld’s village school: a wheel of ten dead rats connected at the tips of their entangled tails. A rat king. Herr Mayer sent the strange specimen on to Ludwig Döderlein, director of the Zoological Museum in nearby Strasbourg. It remains there to this day, preserved in a large, formaldehyde-filled beaker. It isn’t always on display, but whenever the museum presents it, certain people make a direct beeline to the rat king case. The questions are always the same: how did this happen? Could they have lived like this for long? Is this natural?

Herr Mayer was not alone in discovering these strange specimens. The Thuringian town of Altenburg houses perhaps the most spectacular exemplar. A mad bramble of no fewer than 32 rats sits mounted on a plexiglass pane in the entrance hall of the Mauritianum, the town’s small natural history museum. It was found in a village not too far away, in a warm space underneath a chimney. The 32 corpses look sooty and dessicated. By contrast, the rat corpses in Strasbourg have something almost peaceful about them in their flotation tank. Still, the central knot feels upsettingly autonomous, as though it might yet writhe at any moment. Looking at the grotesque tangle of tails, dirt, straw, and feces that binds the group together — it covers half the body of each of the individual rats — it’s hard not to come away with the sense that, like monsters in a story, this object is here to convey some sort of meaning.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2019: Essays

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

Jennifer Baker

Publishing professional, contributing editor to Electric Literature, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology.

Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill (Jasminne Mendez, Queen Mob’s Tea House)

On Facebook author Jasminne Mendez said “Lesson Plan” came out of “an attempt at capturing what I’ve felt and what I can only imagine feeling.” Art at its best, at its height, at its most vivid brings us into an experience so deeply one cannot help but feel the effects of the work in our marrow. “Lesson Plan” captures something unique and raw through structure, precision, poetics, and accuracy of what an initially conventional turned unconventional school day looks like when it comes to a new “normal”: active shooters/drills. How can we keep kids safe? Is that even possible anymore? What pressures are educators under? What and who gets lost when these events occur? When will this kind of terror end? The refrain of “this is not a drill” pulsates throughout. Remember… remember… remember. The bare honesty of “Lesson Plan” exemplifies the kind of writing that inspires you to experiment with how to encapsulate and explore our reality, as distressing as it may be.

Read more…

Anyone’s Son

Fairbanks, Alaska — Monday, December 24, 2018: A vigil site Cody's Eyre's family set up at the site of his death one year prior, where the family ends the walk marking the anniversary of Cody's death and following the last several miles he walked before he was killed by police. The family organized the walk to protest the lack of transparency and accountability in his death on the part of the Fairbanks police department and Alaska State Troopers. (Ash Adams)

Wudan Yan | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,400 words)

Around dinnertime last Christmas Eve, the Eyre family threw on their parkas, stuffed hand warmers into their gloves and pant pockets, slung strings of Christmas lights over their jackets, and went for a walk.

Outside their tri-level house on the northern side of Fairbanks, Alaska, they turned on to Farmers Loop Road, one of the main arteries of the city, and walked along the shoulder. The frozen snow crunched beneath their shoes. It was so cold — roughly 15 below — that your breath billowed back toward you even before you fully exhaled. Cars zoomed by, likely on the way to the homes of loved ones, or completing a last-minute run to the grocery store. Twenty-nine-year-old Samantha Eyre and her younger sister, Kassandra, walked in the front with a banner. On it, their mother, Jean, painted on the shadows of six people, a bear, a moose, and the words #KeepWalkingWithCody.

Christmas is meant to be an evening of gathering and celebration, but it’s taken on a new meaning for the Eyres: Exactly one year prior, police officers shot and killed the family’s youngest and only son, 20-year-old Cody Dalton Eyre.

Cody was having a bad day. He felt suicidal. He got drunk. He brought a gun with him — not uncommon, since many people carry in Alaska. He decided to go for a walk to clear his head. And when Jean called 911, hoping the police could calm him down and bring him home, the opposite happened.

In the months after Cody’s death, the Eyres have received scant information from law enforcement on what exactly happened that night. Cody’s death has raised not only questions for the Eyre family, but other concerns about how law enforcement officers do their jobs. Why is it that police are the first responders to mental health calls? In this case, why did they respond to someone going through a mental health crisis with deadly force? Why has law enforcement been slow to release any public information on this case? And in a place where tension between Natives and law enforcement run high, how could the incidence of these deadly interactions be reduced, or better yet, stopped?

On this walk, Cody’s family now was retracing his last steps, in memoriam. Read more…

The Longreads 2019 Holiday Gift Book Guide

Tiina & Geir / Getty

Let Longreads help you with your holiday shopping! We’ve made a catalog of books we featured in 2019 that we think would make great gifts for everyone on your list.

 

Books of friendships & feuds.

Yuval Taylor’s Zora & Langston is a lavishly detailed account of the friendship, literary collaboration, and epic falling out of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; Dylan Jones’ Wichita Lineman tells the parallel life stories of Jim Webb and Glen Campbell in the years after they came together to create the enigmatic eponymous song; and Andrew Curran’s Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely chronicles Diderot’s intellectual sparring with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Catherine the Great.

Books of conspiracies, coincidences, & cover-ups.

Tim O’Neill’s Chaos lays out the evidence he collected during his 20-year investigation of the Manson family murders; Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies takes a tour of some of the major conspiracy theories haunting the American psyche today; Evan Ratliff’s Mastermind pieces together a vast criminal network that is astonishingly controlled by just one man; Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival examines the extent to which the aftereffects of Chernobyl were covered up by world governments; Brian J. Boeck’s Stalin’s Scribe  hypothesizes that one of Russia’s most beloved classic novels was plagiarized; and Erik Davis’ High Weirdness is a study of the symbolic “synchronicities” that seem to have recurred during three famous psychedelic experiences of the 1970s.

Books about family.

The bonds of family bend and break across vast distances in Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel Patsy; Mira Jacobs’ graphic memoir Good Talk meditates on mothering in a mixed-race family in America; Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers and T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls are memoirs that celebrate family while also reckoning with legacies of neglect and abuse; and Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is a 100-year history of her family’s New Orleans home, which was lost during Hurricane Katrina.

Books of investigations & revelations.

Nicole Weisensee Egan’s Chasing Cosby details how the case against Bill Cosby unfolded and why the story took so long to gain traction in the media; Arthur Holland Michel’s Eyes in the Sky reveals that drone surveillance has become widespread in American cities without much public awareness; Ronnie Citron-Fink’s True Roots investigates the real cost of hair dye to humans and the environment; Reniqua Allen’s It Was All a Dream chronicles black millennials’ experiences of income and racial inequality in the 21st century, and explores how this black generation is persevering in transformative new ways; Emily Bazelon’s Charged explores how the power of prosecutors has grown out of control in many American cities; and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women provides an almost painfully intimate window into the romantic lives of three women who have recently been deeply, obsessively in love with a man.

Frightening books for your fearless friends.

Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is a nailbiting novella of iron-age reenactors and parental abuse; Japanese Ghost Stories is a reissue of Lafcadio Hearn’s foundational collection of ghastly tales; and Mona Awad’s Bunny is a delightfully terrifying novel of sex, magic, and MFAs.

Histories that challenge our understanding of the past.

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments reconstructs the free and experimental lives that black young women and girls were living in the second and third generations born after slavery; Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs revises what the role of the suburb has been in American history, showing that they were sometimes havens for radicals; Robert MacFarlane’s Underland investigates the human underground world, revealing us to be a surprisingly subterranean species; Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide an Empire rewrites the history of the United States from the perspective of its imperial territories; Amir Alexander’s Proof! argues that the discovery of Euclidean geometry profoundly influenced social and political thought; and David Teuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee tells the history of Native America since the Wounded Knee Massacre, reclaiming Native history after the point of its so-called demise.

Compulsively readable fiction.

Bryan Washington’s Lot, by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, is a collection of interlocking short stories named after cities and streets in Houston; Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is a too-real satire of the world after Trump’s coming apocalypse; Mary HK Choi’s Permanent Record explores how modern lives and romances are mediated by technology; Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is a collection of interlocking short stories set in Denver, and in each one a woman has suffered violence at the hands of a man; Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is a straightforward story of teenage romance that becomes more complicated with every twist of the narrative; and Téa Obreht’s Inland is a sprawling Western based on the true story of the U.S. Camel Corps.

Essays & Criticism.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, showcases the craftsmanship of contemporary Native storytelling; Luke O’Neil’s Welcome To Hell World is a vital and despairing collection of essays on modern American life; T Fleischmann’s Time Is a Thing the Body Moves Through uses the artworks of Felix Gonzáles-Torres to reflect on how the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art; Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing is a manifesto that calls for a radical winding down the attention economy; Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain is a love letter to A Tribe Called Quest; and Jess Row’s White Flights is a literary dissection of whiteness in literature.

Minds & bodies.

Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying reconstructs her experience of living with Bipolar II; Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary is a philosophical meditation on menopause; Anne Boyer’s The Undying is a lyrical manifesto against the cancer industrial complex; Keah Brown’s The Pretty One is a lighthearted collection of personal essays that challenge the idea the idea that disability precludes self-love, romance, and happiness; Cameron Dezen Hammon’s memoir This Is My Body reflects on the painful contradictions of harboring deep Evangelical faith in a female body; and Andrea J. Buchanan’s The Beginning of Everything is a memoir of her marriage and mind falling apart.

Extraordinary memoirs.

Ahmet Altan’s I Will Never See the World Again was clandestinely written in the Turkish prison where he is being held as a political dissident; Marc Hamer’s How To Catch a Mole chronicles his rediscovery of the lost art of molecatching; Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is the inventively told tale of how she survived domestic abuse at the hands of her partner; Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True is the story of her experiences in El Salvador as during the civil war, which she famously recorded at the time in verse; Delphine Minou’s I’m Writing You From Tehran is her account of falling in love with the city from which her family had fled; and Matt and Ted Lee’s Hot Box is a whirlwind look at the fast-paced world of high-end catering in New York City.

Book about just one thing.

Semicolons, wind, and beef.

Happy Holidays!

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What Shattered My Mother’s Mind

Yaroslav Mikheev / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Winston Ross | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,290 words)

A week before Thanksgiving last year, I got a call from an officer with the Berkeley Police Department. As I’d suspected, it was about my mother.

My mom, who was 73, hadn’t lived in Berkeley for 28 years. In early November, she told a neighbor she was headed from her home in Springfield, Oregon, to California, to see some old friends. She’d be back, she said, in a year. A couple of days after that, she showed up in our old neighborhood in south Berkeley driving a white Toyota Prius inexplicably decorated with decals of children’s handprints. She then began walking casually into strangers’ homes and refusing to leave.

As the largest wildfire in California history drove tens of thousands of people from their homes and from the Golden State altogether in search of refuge from pernicious levels of smoke and ash choking the skies, my mother headed straight towards the inferno, her car loaded to its ceiling and her loyal dog, Bosley, at her side. And I was powerless to stop her.

When the cops called, I had a pretty good idea why. When the officer said she’d been sleeping in this strangely appointed Prius on the streets of my hometown, I wasn’t surprised. My mother had a home but refused to live in it, convinced I had bugged it as part of a nefarious plot I’d conceived to create a Truman Show out of her life. She traded in her three-year-old car for another one because she believed I’d somehow hacked and disabled her keys. She was homeless by her own making, or at least by the paranoid conspiracy that had overtaken her mind.

The root of this conspiracy is a syndrome as old as medicine. It is a condition an alarming number of health providers, psychiatrists and others who can both inflict and treat it know too little about. That condition is called post-operative delirium, and it afflicts as many as half of elderly patients who undergo surgery, or two million older Americans, each year. As measured in longer hospital stays and follow-up care in nursing homes, delirium’s estimated costs have reached more than $143 billion annually. When you consider that the country’s fastest growing population segment is people over 65, those numbers are certain to grow.

“We should anticipate we’ll see more of it. We’ve always had a problem,” Karin Neufeld, clinic director of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Bayview in eastern Baltimore, told me. “My colleagues haven’t paid attention to it at all, for many, many years.”

As I learned last year, post-operative delirium can quickly plunge an otherwise normal person’s life into chaos.
Read more…

Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…