Search Results for: Nature

A Dead Superhero Is a Marvelous Corpse

Ramzi Fawaz | The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics | New York University Press| January 2016 | 25 minutes (6,662 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The New Mutants, by Ramzi Fawaz, which examines “the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.” This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

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We’ve changed! All of us! We’re more than just human!

—THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1 (November 1961)

We might try to claim that we must first know the fundamentals of the human in order to preserve and promote human life as we know it. But… have we ever yet known the human?

—JUDITH BUTLER, Undoing Gender (2004)

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Who might legitimately represent the human race?

In November 1992 Superman died. The Man of Steel would fall at the hands of the alien villain Doomsday, a thorny-skinned colossus who single-mindedly destroys life throughout the cosmos. Arriving on Earth seeking his next conquest, Doomsday meets his match in the planet’s longtime guardian, known to few in his civilian garb as the meek journalist Clark Kent but beloved by all as the caped hero Superman. After an agonizing battle in the streets of Metropolis, Superman’s urban home, Superman and Doomsday each land a final fatal blow, their last moments of life caught on camera and broadcast to devastated viewers around the world. The fictional media firestorm surrounding Superman’s death mirrored real-world responses to DC Comics’ announcement of their decision to end the life of America’s first superhero earlier that year. Months before the story was even scripted, national print and television media hailed Superman’s death as an event of extraordinary cultural significance, propelling what initially appeared as an isolated creative decision into the realm of public debate.

Public opinion ranged widely, from those who interpreted Superman’s downfall as a righteous critique of America’s moral bankruptcy to those who recognized it as a marketing stunt to boost comic book sales. In an editorial for the Comics Buyer’s Guide years later, leading comic book retailer Chuck Rozanski claimed that upon hearing about the decision, he had called DC Comics editor Paul Levitz, pleading with him that “since Superman was such a recognized icon within America’s overall popular culture . . . DC had no more right to ‘kill’ him than Disney had the right to ‘kill’ Mickey Mouse.” According to Rozanski, by choosing to kill Superman for sensational purposes, DC would be breaking an implicit promise to the American people to preserve the hero’s legacy as a “trustee of a sacred national image.” Read more…

Our Well-Regulated Militia

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Alexander Chee | Longreads | April 2016 | 15 minutes (3,713 words)

My partner Dustin and I recently bought a cabin in a 1930s-era hunting association a few hours from New York City. Out in the yard is a game hook for hanging a deer after shooting it. We are thinking of turning it into a swing.

Last summer, my retired prison guard neighbor there tried to convince me to do two things: marry Dustin—“I’ve seen too many gay guys like you get screwed by the family when something happens to one of you”—and get a hunting license to help him shoot some of the bears. We thanked him but did not marry, and as for the hunting license, we prefer watching the bears eat apples from the trees in the meadow—you could even say we prefer the bears to some of our neighbors.

The bears don’t bother us.

Most of the members of the association don’t seem to hunt much. Dustin and I go up regularly, every other weekend, and only a few times a year do we really hear anyone off in the woods shooting at anything. One day another neighbor appeared in camouflage and a bush helmet, carrying a bow and arrow, inviting us over to drinks.

Real hunting, as I know from my own family life, is hard. You have to be in decent shape, you need to be dressed for the weather, sprayed for bugs, you need sunblock, you need food packed for the day, you have to have a good dog you’ve trained year round, and you have to be able to field-dress what you kill or at least drag it to where you parked your car. Also: you need to know how not to get lost in the woods. I have a lot of respect for many of these hunters even if I don’t agree with what they’re doing or want to participate in it.

But I also know my cousin Jon back in Maine has a sideline as a butcher for deer and moose, was young when he learned how to carve them up from his game warden father, and he gets a little money and a little or sometimes a lot of meat from it, plus bones for his dog. This sideline exists because most of the hunters coming through his small town don’t know how to do what he does, or they can’t be bothered to do it.

His venison with garlic marinade is exceptional. Every time I have it, I’m grateful to his clients.

I wonder if the day will come when I’ll have to buy a gun. I’m just afraid that when the day comes, it won’t be because I’m hunting bears. Read more…

Fans, Fiction, and Representation: A New Hope

There’s something about Star Wars: The Force Awakens that feels both delightful and urgent, as if it were both a joy to create and a story that must be told at this particular moment in history. People who lined up to see the film when it released last December—and then immediately bought tickets to see it again—are now buying the DVD or Blu-Ray or streaming version so they can watch The Force Awakens for the fifth (or tenth) time at home. They’re also creating fanart, writing their own narratives, and celebrating the idea that the Hero’s Journey has been opened up to a new group of heroes. Read more…

What Ever Happened to Planet Vulcan?

An orrery, or mechanical model of the solar system. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Leveson | The Hunt for Vulcan: … And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe | Random House | November 2015 | 27 minutes (7,305 words)

 

The excerpt below is adapted from The Hunt for Vulcan, by Thomas Leveson. In light of recent theorizing about a mysterious new Planet X, this story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

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Not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become.

In the 1830s (and still) number 63 Quai d’Orsay turned an attractive face toward the river. In the guidebooks already being read by that novel nineteenth-century species, the tourist, number 63 is described as a “handsome house”—one, the writers warned, that concealed a much more plebeian reality. Visitors—by appointment only, no more than two at a time, welcome only on Thursdays—would be ushered into a courtyard, and then on to the rooms where workers, mostly women, took bales of raw tobacco through every stage needed to produce the finished stuff of habit: hand-rolled cigars, spun strands of chew that became “the solace of the Havre marin,” gentlemen’s snuff. Most of the campus was turned over to laborers serving the machines—choppers, oscillating funnels, snuff mills, rollers, sifters, cutters, and more. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the works at the Quai d’Orsay would turn out more than 5,600 tons of finished tobacco per year, and was, according to the ubiquitous Baedeker, “worthy of a visit”—though indulging one’s curiosity carried a price: “the pungent smell of the tobacco saturates the clothes and is not easily got rid of.”

A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d’Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France’s École des Tabacs.

No one ever doubted that Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier had potential: he had been a star student in secondary school, winner of second prize in a national mathematics competition, eighth in his class at the polytechnique. But his early career offered no hints to what would follow. Funneled into the tobacco engineering section in university, he was more or less shunted directly toward the Quai d’Orsay and the task of solving French big tobacco’s problems.

It’s not clear whether Le Verrier actively enjoyed the life of a tobacco engineer—or merely tolerated it. Nothing in his later career remotely suggests he was a born chemist. But he was consistent: if given a task, he got down to it. Never mind all that early training in abstract mathematics; if required, he could be as practical as the next man, and so turned himself into a student of the combustion of phosphorus. That was useful research—tobacco monopolists care about matches. But whether or not he relished his job, he certainly got out as soon as he could. A position back at the École polytechnique opened up in 1836 for a répétiteur— assistant—to the professor of chemistry. Le Verrier applied, and as an until-then almost uniformly successful prodigy, had every hope. . . until the post went to someone else.

Le Verrier would prove to be a man who catalogued slights, tallied enemies, and held his grudges close. But he never accepted a check as a measure of his true worth. A second assistantship became available, this time in astronomy. He applied for that too. Never mind his seven years among the tobacco plants; Le Verrier seems to have believed that he could simply ramp up his math chops to the standard required at the highest level of French quantitative science. As he wrote to his father, “I must not only accept but seek out opportunities to extend my knowledge. [. . . ] I have already ascended many ranks, why should I not continue to rise further?” Thus it was that Le Verrier came into orbit around the great body of work left by that giant of French astronomy, Pierre-Simon Laplace. Read more…

The Good, the Bad, and the Highly Personal: A Reading List About Haircuts

Photo: Brian Auer

In 2011,  I had hair down my back. It was thick, wavy, and supposedly enviable. I hated it. I wanted it off my face, but my sensitive scalp made me prone to headaches and “sore spots,” as I’d called them since childhood. I didn’t have a knack for hot styling tools, which meant I was at the mercy of luck. When a bad hair day struck, I had to wait it out. I spent middle school trying to emulate the hyper-straightened hair of the popular girls and high school begrudgingly accepting my texture and reading a thousand WikiHow articles on living a shampoo-free life. I never could give up washing my hair completely. I’ve even made the mistake of getting bangs.

My first short haircut was a revelation. Two of my college friends accompanied me to a salon in Pittsburgh I chose via Yelp (I did not trust the hair-cutting joints in my small rural college town). My stylist was nervous, but my fellow clients and her colleagues encouraged us both. I wish I remembered her name. I felt as though I were a block of marble and my pixie cut, a sculpting. I could finally be who I was. I debuted my new “lifestyle” (the stylist’s words!) that night at the faculty talent show, striding up and down the aisles of the auditorium.

How strange that the fuzzy stuff on top of our heads is fraught with social and political implications, that it can destroy our self-esteem or make us feel like new creations. Read more…

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

Two sisters in their traditional, everyday, Lancaster County Amish attire. Photo: Tessa Smucker

Kelsey Osgood | Atlas Obscura | March 2016 | 28 minutes (7,014 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Kelsey Osgood, and is co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Author’s Note: “Alex” and “Rebecca” are not the real names of two people interviewed. They felt strongly that they should not be identified by name out of respect for their faith’s general belief in the body above the individual.

The road that runs through the main village of Berlin, Ohio, only about 90 minutes south of Cleveland, is called “Amish Country Byway” for its unusual number of non-automotive travelers and it’s true that driving down it, you’ll have to slow down for the horse-drawn buggies that clog up the right lane. But those seeking the “real” Amish experience in downtown Berlin might be disappointed. It’s more Disney than devout: a playground for tourists full of ersatz Amish “schnuck” (Pennsylvania Dutch for “cute”) stores selling woven baskets and postcards of bucolic farm scenes.

You only see the true Holmes County, which is home to the largest population of Amish-Mennonites in the world, when you turn off Route 62 and venture into the rolling green hills interrupted periodically by tiny towns with names like Charm and Big Prairie. You’ll likely lose service on your cell phone just as the manure smell starts to permeate the air. On my visit this past summer, I saw Amish people–groups of children sporting round straw hats, the young women in their distinctive long dresses–spilling out of family barns, where church services are held, in the distance. The Amish don’t have any spiritual attachment to a geographical location, the way Jews have to Jerusalem or Mormons to Salt Lake City; this spot, along with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is probably the closest they come to an idea of God’s Country. Read more…

Liar: A Memoir

Rob Roberge | Liar: A Memoir Crown | February 2016 | 23 minutes (5,688 words)

When Rob Roberge learns that he’s likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he’s terrified at the prospect of losing “every bad and beautiful moment” of his life. So he grasps for snatches of time, desperately documenting each tender, lacerating fragment. Liar is a meditation on the fragile nature of memory, mental illness, addiction, and the act of storytelling. The first chapter is excerpted below.

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Read more…

Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy

Kevin Bales | Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World | Spiegel & Grau | January 2016 | 34 minutes (9,162 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Blood and Earth, by Kevin Bales, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

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We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones.

It’s never a happy moment when you’re shopping for a tombstone. When death comes, it’s the loss that transcends everything else and most tombstones are purchased in a fog of grief. Death is a threshold for the relatives and friends who live on as well, changing lives in both intense and subtle ways. It’s the most dramatic and yet the most mundane event of a life, something we all do, no exceptions, no passes.

Given the predictability of death it seems strange that Germany has a tombstone shortage. It’s not because they don’t know that people are going to die; it’s more a product of the complete control the government exerts over death and funerals. Everyone who dies must be embalmed before burial, for example, and the cremated can be buried only in approved cemeteries, never scattered in gardens or the sea. Rules abound about funerals and tombstones—even the size, quality, and form of coffins and crypts are officially regulated. All this leads to a darkly humorous yet common saying: “If you feel unwell, take a vacation—you can’t afford to die in Germany.”

Granite for German tombstones used to come from the beautiful Harz Mountains, but now no one is allowed to mine there and risk spoiling this protected national park and favorite tourist destination. So, like France and many other rich countries, including the United States, Germany imports its tombstones from the developing world.

Some of the best and cheapest tombstones come from India. In 2013 India produced 35,342 million tons of granite, making it the world’s largest producer. Add to this a growing demand for granite kitchen countertops in America and Europe, and business is booming. There are more precious minerals of course, but fortunes can be made in granite. In the United States, the average cost of installing those countertops runs from $2,000 to $8,000, but the price charged by Indian exporters for polished red granite is just $5 to $15 per square meter—that comes to about $100 for all the granite your kitchen needs. The markup on tombstones is equally high. The red granite tombstones that sell for $500 to $1,000 in the United States, and more in Europe, are purchased in bulk from India for as little as $50, plus a US import duty of just 3.7 percent.

Leaving aside what this says about the high cost of dying, how can granite be so cheap? The whole point of granite, that it is hard and durable, is also the reason it is difficult to mine and process. It has to be carefully removed from quarries in large thin slabs, so you can’t just go in with dynamite and bulldozers. Careful handling means handwork, which requires people with drills and chisels, hammers and crowbars gently working the granite out of the ground. And in India, the most cost effective way to achieve that is slavery. Read more…

When the Messiah Came to America, She Was a Woman

Robert Owen's vision of New Harmony, Indiana. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Chris Jennings | Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism | Random House | January 2016 | 29 minutes (7,852 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Paradise Now, Chris Jennings’ look at the history of the golden age of American utopianism, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky. 

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A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. . . .
—OSCAR WILDE

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Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

At noon, darkness spread across the sky. It was the nineteenth of May 1780, a Friday. On the rolling pastureland of western New England, sheep and cows lay down one by one in the damp grass. As the darkness became total, finches and warblers quieted and returned to their roosts. Above the white pines and budding oaks, bats stirred. Mistaking day for night, they took wing.

The fratricidal war for American independence was grinding into its fifth year. A week earlier, the Continental army had surrendered the smoldering port of Charleston to the British navy after more than a month of heavy shelling. In New England, with so many young men off fighting, gardens went unplanted and the wheat grew thin.

For many colonists the war with Great Britain aroused a stolid nationalist piety, a consoling faith in “the sacred cause of liberty”—the belief that providence would guide the rebels to victory and that the fighting itself constituted an appeal to heaven. But in the hilly borderland between New York and Massachusetts, the anxiety and austerity of the long conflict inspired frenzied revival meetings. This was the New Light Stir, an aftershock of the Great Awakening of radical Protestantism that had coursed through New England in the 1740s. From makeshift pulpits, the New Light evangelists shouted an urgent millenarian message: These are the Latter Days; the Kingdom is at hand.

Standing at the crack of American independence, these backwoods Yankees believed that they were living the final hours of history. It is written: He will come back and the righteous will be delivered from sin for a thousand years of earthly peace and happiness. The New Lights believed that the time had come and that their small revivals, held in fields and cowsheds, would trigger the return of Christ and the millennium of heaven on earth. Looking up from their plows and their milking stools, these hill-country farmers scanned the horizon for signs of His approach. Read more…

The Salmon’s Identity Crisis

https://www.flickr.com/photos/havbrukssenter/5363116359/

We’ve domesticated dogs, chickens, pigs and countless plants. Now we’re doing the same to wild fish. In the science magazine Nautilus, Matthew Berger writes about how cultivation is not only changing the salmon genetically, but about what cultivation means to the idea of salmon, and to humanity’s relationship with nature. Exploring evolution and the history of salmon aquaculture, Berger asks: when does this domesticated crop no longer resemble its wild ancestor, and does it matter?

But salmon have changed, and that change has been more than genetic or morphological or geographic; it’s been a change in vocabulary and perception. Domestication has created a kind of relativity, undermining what makes a salmon a salmon. This generation’s grandkids will probably know salmon as that plentiful fish raised in pens, not as a creature that has evolved to migrate thousands of miles through freshwater, saltwater, over waterfalls, and around dams.

Gross sees domesticated salmon as “a continuation of human agricultural development that began 10,000 years ago.” Today, that agricultural enterprise is touching new species and leaving its mark on not just animals in pens but the ones that remain, to whatever degree, “wild.”

Read the story