Search Results for: New York Review of Books

Whose Boots on the Ground

military boots against the background of small identical tombstones
Illustration by Homestead Studio

Kiley Bense | Longreads | November 2019 | 14 minutes (3,580 words)

 

What I notice are the boots: two pairs in worn black leather, lined up beneath a bookcase, their heels pressed against the turquoise-painted baseboard. They look as if their owner had stowed them there in one careless motion, after yanking them off his feet. The toes of one pair turn slightly into each other, just kissing, and the others face off-kilter toward the corner of the room.

This room is a shrine made by freezing the contents of a life in time. It belonged to a French soldier, Hubert Rochereau, who was killed during World War I at the age of 22. His parents sealed off his bedroom intact, and when they sold the house the deed included a stipulation that the new owners leave the room untouched for 500 years.

The wallpaper in the room is a pale pink-and-white stripe, the bedspread a fading snowflake-patterned lace. The books have cloth covers and paper labels taped over their spines. There are framed photographs on the shelf, and on the desk sit an iron-wrought key and a tarnished pipe. A tattered soldier’s coat hangs beside the desk, all its brass buttons dulled with age, the blue fabric fraying.

I got stuck on those boots and on this room vibrating with the memory of a man gone more than a century, because here was a memorial for a soldier that didn’t erase him as an individual: a young man with a serious gaze and dark hair.

When we remember our war dead, we often do so en masse. We visit fields where rows of white headstones radiate outward in straight lines, touching the horizon. We pin red poppies to our lapels and stick yellow ribbons to our bumpers, hoping to express our collective grief. We hold a minute of silence, or two, marking thousands of vanished souls with an absence of sound. We leave a wreath at the base of a monument inscribed with so many names that it would be impossible to linger on any one of them, let alone understand and feel the pain that each of their deaths meant to those they left behind.

Last month, at a rally in Minnesota, as he talked about his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, Donald Trump invoked the deaths of service members and his own feelings about meeting their families as they waited to greet the coffins of their loved ones at Dover Air Force Base. He called visits there “a very tough experience.” “We meet them, and we talked to them, and their son or daughter is being flown in from some far away place in a coffin, and these things are just impossible. I don’t know how parents can do it, even […] I see parents make sounds, that were just 20 minutes ago absolutely fine, make sounds, scream and cry like you’ve never seen before,” he said. Trump noted how surprised he was by this display of emotion, how he hadn’t expected it because the mourners seemed “okay” before the caskets arrived. He didn’t mention any of the families or soldiers by name.
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Carrying Histories of Protest

Joe Raedle / Getty, Algonquin Books

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | excerpt from Ordinary Girls: A Memoir | October 2019 | 11 minutes (3,065 words)

 

Puerto Rico, 1985

Papi and I waited in the town square of Ciales, across from Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the Catholic church. He was quiet, stern-faced, his picked-out Afro shining in the sun, his white polo shirt drenched in sweat. Papi was tall and lean-muscled, with a broad back. He’d grown up boxing and playing basketball, had a thick mustache he groomed every morning in front of the bathroom mirror. Squinting in the sun, one hand tightened around his ring finger, I pulled off Papi’s ring, slipped it onto my thumb. I was six years old and restless: I’d never seen a dead body.

My father’s hero, Puerto Rican poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer, had just died. People had come from all over the island and gathered outside the parish to hear his poetry while his remains were transported from San Juan. Mami and Anthony, my older brother, were lost somewhere in the crowd.

During the drive from Humacao to Ciales, I’d listened from the backseat while Papi told the story: how Corretjer had been raised in a family of independentistas, how he’d spent his entire life fighting for el pueblo, for the working class, for Puerto Rico’s freedom. How he’d been a friend of Pedro Albizu Campos, “El Maestro,” who my father adored, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader who’d spent more than twenty-six years in prison for attempting to overthrow the US government. How he had spent a year in “La Princesa,” the prison where Albizu Campos was tortured with radiation. After his release, Corretjer became one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent activist writers.
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I Had a Friend. He Dreamed of Israel.

Illustration by Eléonore Hamelin

Michael Shapiro | Longreads | October 2019 | 28 minutes (7,073 words)

This essay is published in collaboration with The Delacorte Review. You can read a longer, complete version here.

I told people that I was returning to Israel for the first time in thirty-five years to visit a grave and this stopped them, mercifully, from asking why I had been away for so long. This was true; I was going to visit the grave of my best friend, Jonathan Maximon, who had died in 1984 when he was thirty-one. It was also true that I could have gone back in all the years since but for reasons I could not explain to anyone, including myself, I had stayed away.

My wife had twice gone for work, and though we had traveled with our children, we did not take them to Israel, nor send them on Birthright. Then, not long ago, my daughter mentioned that she might be going and while I did not want to intrude on her time, overlapping by a day or so felt like the pretext I needed. Her plans changed but by then I had my ticket.

Jonnie was buried at Yahel, the kibbutz at the southern end of the Negev desert that he had helped found in the late 1970s. I had not been in touch with his wife, Aliza, since his death. I emailed the kibbutz and asked if my message could be passed along. She replied almost immediately. “I am still in Yahel,” she wrote. “Mark my husband, and myself will be happy to meet you.” She and Mark had four grown children. Moriyah, her daughter with Jonnie who had been a year old when he died, now lived in the north and was married with two young sons. He would have been a grandfather.

I was 66 and had not made this trip since Jonnie’s brother called to tell me he was gravely ill. I had just gotten married and was preparing to move to Tokyo. My wife, Susan, told me, “Go.” I had last seen Jonnie seven months earlier. Susan and I were traveling in Egypt and Israel. We took the bus from Jerusalem four hours south to Yahel, which then, like now, felt as if it was in the middle of nowhere. I was so excited to see him that I left my leather jacket on the bus. Hanging over my desk as I write this is a snapshot from that visit. He and I are leaning on a white jeep. He is wearing a San Francisco Fire Department t-shirt that is tight across his broad shoulders. He was always nuts about fire fighters. Together with Aliza and Susan, we went on our only double date to see ”Play it Again, Sam” in the kibbutz cafeteria and as we walked back to their apartment Jonnie told me that I’d be an idiot not to marry Susan because if I didn’t someone else would and quickly. I do not recall his saying this with a smile. Nor was he one to elaborate.

The next time I saw him he was lying in a bed in a dismal ward at Tel HaShomer Hospital near Tel Aviv. A tumor in his spine had paralyzed him from the waist down. His hair was falling out and he was skeletal. Another patient told him, “Get out of this place.” He did, but only to a private room.
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Records on Bone

Photo courtesy of the author

Tali Perch | Colorado Review | August 2019 | 46 minutes (9,154 words)

 

Vladimir Vysotsky, or the “Russian Bob Dylan,” has been dead for almost forty years, but were he still alive on this day, my father’s sixty-seventh birthday, we wouldn’t be playing his music anyway. We would play the music that made us American — Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Neil Diamond — the same music we play now on this television, in this living room, in this beautiful house of my parents’ immigrant dreams. My brothers and I dance uproariously with our children to “Dancing Queen” and “Born in the usa,” and tenderly with our spouses to “Human Nature” and “Heartlight.” As a child I remember dancing with my father to these songs. But back then the parties were in the cramped living room of our tenement apartment near Newark, New Jersey, or in the similar dwellings of other immigrant families we knew. We ate Russian food, for it was the only food the mothers knew how to make, and the men drank vodka, for some habits are too hard to break. But in those early post-immigration years, no one cared to play Russian music or to be otherwise reminded of a past they loathed enough to flee.

Tonight Mom and Dad watch from their separate loveseats, beaming with joy, in a rare peace that has as much to do with wine and vodka as with the frolicking of children and grandchildren. Occasionally they hold the gazes of my two younger brothers, who managed to be born in America and have no memory of the post-immigration chaos that we three endured. I am jealous of how easily they are able to look each other in the eye. For Mom, Dad, and me, eye contact is like an embrace, a tear, or perhaps, one of Vysotsky’s melodies — too intimate. Our eyes are mirrors reflecting truths more easily avoided. Read more…

A Fresh Look at The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1998 Album Adore

Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins. Photo by Niels van Iperen/Getty Images

Jovana Babovic | The 33 1/3 B-Sides | Bloomsbury Academic | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,025 words)

 

I saw the Smashing Pumpkins play in 1996 as they toured in support of their third studio album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It’s difficult to articulate exactly what I liked about the band’s music at the time beyond that it resonated with my general teenage angst, but I do remember that I jumped around, sang along, and nearly experienced euphoria during the show. I continued to follow the Pumpkins for several more years. I bought their two subsequent records as well as some B-sides and live recordings. My enthusiasm, however, gradually waned. The more time passed, the less likely it seemed that I would ever revisit my favorite bands from the 1990s like the Smashing Pumpkins, let alone their less popular albums like 1998’s Adore and 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God.

I wasn’t the only one who lost interest in the Smashing Pumpkins by the end of the 1990s. Album sales plunged, and the group eventually disbanded. In the years that followed, primary songwriter and frontman Billy Corgan reformed the Pumpkins in several different incarnations and released four more albums under the band’s name. Corgan also performed under different monikers, published a book of poetry, and opened a tea shop and art space in Chicago, while the other original members similarly remained active with new projects. Although the Smashing Pumpkins never left the public eye, they did not accrue many new listeners after the mid-1990s. Instead, most fans retrospectively cite Mellon Collie and its predecessor, 1993’s Siamese Dream, as the band’s cornerstone outputs. When Rolling Stone conducted a readers’ poll of the best Pumpkins songs in 2012, only one of the twenty tracks voted onto the list (“Ava Adore” from Adore) had been released on an album proceeding Mellon Collie. Critics tend to agree with this hierarchization. When Stereogum writer and 33 1/3 author Ryan Laes ranked the Pumpkins’ ten best songs in 2018, only one (again “Ava Adore”) was not from the mid-1990s. “There’s a lot to love about Corgan’s work after his peak years,” Laes conceded, “but nothing matches the weight and impact of what he did when he was young and furious.” Others were more forthcoming. New York Times music critic Joe Coscarelli suggested that Corgan “has never again sniffed the creative or commercial success of the band’s heyday.” By all estimations, that heyday ended with the release of Adore.

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‘I Was Interested in the People Who Are Stuck With These Memories.’

Graffiti on a wall in South Central Los Angeles, 1992. (Photo by Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

Victoria Namkung | Longreads | October 2019 | 16 minutes (4,240 words)

On March 16, 1991, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins went to a local convenience store in South Los Angeles to buy a bottle of orange juice. Owner Soon Ja Du accused the teenage girl of shoplifting, an altercation ensued, and in a split-second captured on video, Du shot Harlins in the back of the head. She died with two dollars in her hand. A jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter, but against their recommendation, the judge sentenced the Korean-born woman to a $500 fine, probation, and community service.

Harlins’ murder, which occurred two weeks after the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers, was a major contributing factor to the city’s 1992 uprising—LA’s deadliest year—which resulted in 63 deaths, thousands of injuries, and more than 800 million in material losses. By the end of the unrest, known as Saigu among Koreans, rioters had looted, set fire, and damaged more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.

Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay, based on the murder of Harlins, is an empathetic and nuanced portrayal of two southern California families forever connected by violence and tragedy. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the novel is centered on Korean American Grace Park, a naïve and dutiful daughter who lives and works in the Valley with her secret-keeping parents, and Shawn Matthews, an African American ex-con whose sister was murdered by a Korean grocery store owner.

A new shocking crime sends the Parks and Matthews on a collision course to face their shared history against the backdrop of an already tense city on the cusp of more racial violence. Taut and razor-sharp, Your House Will Pay masterfully examines themes of racism, revenge, incarceration, grief, shame, injustice, and social movements. Read more…

Bikini Kill — and My Bunkmates — Taught Me How to Unleash My Anger

Jeff Kravitz / Getty, Seal Press

Melissa Febos | Longreads | excerpted from Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger | October 2019 | 13 minutes (3,398 words)

My father and I sat in near silence for the four-hour drive to western Massachusetts. The worst possible thing had happened: my father had read my diary. Now, my parents were sending me to summer camp for three weeks. Over the previous eighteen months, I had undergone a personality transformation. They had seen the outward signs — how my grades slipped and my once gregarious and sweet disposition now alternated between despondency, sulking, and fury. The diary revealed that this new me also lied and drank and spent as much time as possible in the company of bad influences and older boys who either believed that I really was sixteen or didn’t care that I was actually thirteen. I, too, was confounded by my transformation and so my diary offered a meticulous accounting of events with little reflection. When I imagined my father reading it, my mind blanched white hot, like an exposed negative. My body was brand new but felt singed around the edges, already ruined in some principal way.
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When the Dishes Are Done, I Wonder About Progress

Lady Godiva rides through the streets of Coventry. July 1, 1962. (John Franks/Keystone/Getty Images)

Sarah Haas | Longreads | October 2019 | 11 minutes (2,825 words)

In the days after reading Coventry, Rachel Cusk’s newest book and first collection of essays, I knew I’d been affected — deeply — but struggled to understand how. A binding together of pieces published between 2006 and 2019, it’s not clear whether Coventry was written with its final product in mind. Sure, the architecture seems intentional — as in it makes sense to read the collection from left to right — but without a central nor obvious thesis at its core, interpretation of the whole seemed to require an unfounded creativity. To make sense of Coventry I’d created a narrative that positioned the book against Cusk’s own storied life, imagining the collection as an allegory for the author’s experience of having been pummeled by so many critics. Reviewers of her other nonfiction works have called Cusk “condescending,” “terrible,” and cruel — an adjective that still sticks to her persona today. Wanting for narrative, I imbued Coventry with the arc, protagonists, and villains I’d imagined part of her life story. But then I heard Cusk’s voice like a whisper, proclaiming the death of exposition and character, as she did in a 2017 interview with The New Yorker. Cusk has been careful to ensure the absence of both in her work but, habituated to expect it, I’d struggled to yield. Just past the edge of my attention, my mind filled in the void by assigning Cusk the burden of the narrative’s enactment. It was the first time as a reader that I felt the success of a book depended not on the author’s ability, but on mine. Read more…

Swipe Right: A Reading List about Online Dating

Getty Images

They wrote you an intro

Wow and hello. You seem phenomenal and you probably receive four million messages but I just couldn’t resist…

Gorgeous woman, you are taller than me. I’m bummed.

I am capable of taking care of you financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I love unconditionally, with all my heart, and I love you as you are. 

Your hair looks nice. See ya.

My self-summary

Some days I log in and read introductory messages that ring hollow, like the promises of car salesmen. Others, I receive long and far too intense missives declaring love or making some other absurd commitment based on a quick glance at my photos. And most days, I receive a tepid “hey.” Most days, I ask myself why I bother maintaining a profile –– what am I hoping to find? And isn’t there a better way to date?

I had never used a dating app until a few months ago: a combination of introverted tendencies, a series of summers spent at an evangelical Christian camp, and a traumatic sexual assault in college made it so I was scared to form relationships with people I knew in real life, let alone strangers on the internet. But after my first long term relationship ended, I moved across the country to a town where I knew hardly anyone and made a profile for the first time. While uploading photos and answering questions, processes which underscore just how much artifice is involved with online dating, I grew a little nervous. I had heard stories from friends about men who ghosted them; who retaliated viciously via email and other social media platforms when rejected; or who showed up to the date and weren’t exactly who they said they would be. After being in a safe, committed relationship for so long, the idea of trusting someone to be kind and respectful on a first date was nerve-wracking, but I took precautions in my own way, and tried dating.

At first, it was fun, even exceeded my expectations. I met people I otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to find within the scope of my daily life. I explored parts of my new locale with people who have histories here, and enjoyed visiting places I’ll continue to return to. And the dates were lovely, for the most part. There was homemade pizza and wine in a park; dates who snuck away to secretly cover the bill without asking for anything in return; and hikes where we foraged for berries in spots only a local would know. 

But there was also the guy who lived at home, told me his mom cooked for him every night, and that he would expect his partner to do the same. There was the man who told me, after a few dates, that his friends had agreed I was “too smart” because I had earned my PhD. And, there was the date who leaned across the table to pet my hair and told me I would be “even hotter if I hunted,” though he had proselytized veganism to me just moments before. 

After some time, skimming profiles no longer excited me. Instead, the series of photos started to look like a grid of loneliness, in each answer some sort of want.

I spend a lot of time thinking about

Are dating apps the best way to meet people in this day and age? Do they even work?

Gina DiVittorio’s viral video about dating on Hinge.

How much of my relatively positive experience on dating apps is based on location? My identity as a straight, cis, white woman who has an invisible –– rather than visible –– disability?

Are there ways to improve online dating so that it is safer, more inclusive, and less discriminatory?

What I’m actually looking for

The same as everyone else, probably: to permanently log off these apps.

1. What I Learned Tindering My Way Across Europe (Allison P. Davis, March 21, 2016, Travel + Leisure)

I use them all—Tinder, chiefly, but also Hinge, Bumble, Happn, Desperat*n (I made that one up) 3nder, Flattr—and they are all swipes to nowhere. In boom times I experience a weak trickle of men; during drought, it’s like I’m in the dating version of The Martian—except Matt Damon did eventually receive messages from humans.

When Allison P. Davis left Brooklyn to travel across Europe, she wondered if dating would be any less lackluster, or if Tinder would offer her anything other than sex. In chronicling a variety of dating experiences and encounters in London, Berlin, and Stockholm, Davis ruminates on the differences between dating in the U.S. and abroad, particularly as a black woman. 

2. Diary (Emily Witt, October 25, 2012, London Review of Books)

Subletting an apartment for a week in San Francisco, Emily Witt goes to a bar alone in hopes of finding some form of human connection. Instead, she ends up perusing OkCupid. Witt, in this piece, offers a comprehensive history of online dating and ruminates about the specific kind of loneliness that beckons people to online dating apps. 

I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile.

3. ‘So Can You F*ck?’: What It’s Like to Online Date With a Disability (Sarah Kim, April 15, 2018, The Daily Beast)

It’s not news that lots of women receive ridiculous and misogynistic messages on dating apps, especially on Tinder. But as a 22-year-old with cerebral palsy, I get one at least twice a week.

‘So can you f*ck?’

‘But you look normal in your pictures.’

When Sarah Kim creates online dating profiles, she questions whether or not to immediately disclose her disability or to let potential suitors get to know her before sharing. By interviewing a range of experts like sexologist Dr. Mitchell Tepper and therapist Dr. Danielle Sheypuk, and other people with disabilities who have dated using apps before, Kim offers valuable insight and ultimately comes to the conclusion that how –– and when –– to disclose can be handled in a variety of ways, and decisions are best left up to each individual.

 

Related read: Online dating is hard enough. Try doing it with a disability. (Timothy Sykes, January 18, 2014, The Guardian)

 

4. How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love (Kevin Poulsen, January 21, 2014, Wired)

As summer drew to a close, he’d been on more than 55 dates, each one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had led to second dates; only one had led to a third.

Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations.

After largely striking out on OkCupid, Chris McKinlay decided to put his mathematical prowess to the test, using a Python script to create a database of women’s answers and subsequently analyze patterns. With his unconventional approach, he succeeded in going on far more first dates –– but not many at all led further. As Kevin Poulsen notes in this strange and fascinating story, McKinlay had to strike a balance between calculation and human intuition in order to find true love.

5. What It’s Like To Date Online as a Trans Person (Brittany Wong, October 29, 2018, Huffington Post)

Tinder only enabled users to select gender identities such as “‘transgender,’ ‘trans man,’ ‘trans woman’ and ‘gender queer’” three years ago. Slow to evolve, OkCupid, Tinder, and Grindr have put transgender users at risk in their failure to incorporate inclusive models, as Christiana Rose, Dawn Dismuke, and Jackson Bird explain in their interviews with Brittany Wong.

Though roughly 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender, there’s still a widespread lack of understanding of trans issues among the general public. And sadly, transphobia is on the rise; 2017 was the deadliest year for transgender people, with at least 28 deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign.

6. I Thought My Immigrant Mother Would Never Accept My Queerness. I Was Wrong. (Krutika Mallikarjuna, February 19, 2019, Bitch)

Of the many pitfalls of being a queer desi woman swiping through Tinder, I never expected to find myself getting trashed in a bar trying to forget that I was on a date with a white girl named India.

After a date unsettles her, Krutika Mallikarjuna finds herself reflecting on her mother’s reticence to accept her as queer, and experiences a deep depression. Mallikarjuna, in this essay excerpted from The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, chronicles the ways her relationship with her mother has evolved as a result of therapy and phone calls, eventually leading to shared laughter over a date gone wrong.

7. ‘Least Desirable’? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating (Ashley Brown, January 9, 2018, NPR)

OkCupid released a blog post in 2014 showing dating that “most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities. Similarly, Asian men fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women.” Through interviews with people who have encountered racism on dating apps, and interviews with experts who consider how apps might evolve to become more inclusive, Ashley Brown offers a harrowing portrait of the harm caused by racist dating app users.

Other dating experts have pointed to such stereotypes and lack of multiracial representation in the media as part of the likely reason that plenty of online daters have had discouraging experiences based on their race.

8. Guys are Reporting Women On Tinder for the Crime of Not Being Into Them (Lauren Vinopal, September 10, 2019, MEL Magazine)  

After Lauren Vinopal politely declines a date with a man, he sends her a slew of rude text messages before reporting her to Tinder, resulting in her being banned from the platform. When Vinopal researches the cause, she discovers she’s not the only woman to be banned for rejecting a man –– in fact, there are a large number of others who share her experience.

Many other people have reportedly been banned for reasons that have nothing to do with terms and conditions — e.g., disclosing that they have herpes, identifying as transgender, or in the strangely specific case of 32-year-old Nichole, posting a picture with a dead deer during hunting season.

9. Why It’s So Hard for Young People to Date Offline (Ashley Fetters, September 5, 2019, The Atlantic)

Such a staggering number of millennials start dating because of connections made through apps that Camille Virginia wrote a book called The Offline Dating Method, which provides tricks and tips for potential daters to make conversation in public and frequent places where they might find a partner. Ashley Fetters, in addition to providing an overview of Virginia’s book, contemplates how much the era of “stranger danger” and the increasing prevalence of convenience in apps across the board –– in areas of food, services, etc., –– have contributed to people relying on online dating.

In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)

***

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Fire Sale: Finance and Fascism in the Amazon Rainforest

Brasil2/E+/Getty

In a recent piece for Jacobin, climate writers Alyssa Battistoni and Thea Riofrancos drew a connection between fires burning in Greenland and those still ablaze in the Amazon rainforest: “They’re being sparked by the rich and powerful, whether by agricultural conglomerates, complicit right-wing governments, or fossil fuel executives who’ve lied to the public so they can keep spewing heat-trapping carbon up into the atmosphere for a quick buck.” The simplicity of the claim was dumbfounding, and, to that end, haunting. Was it merely the rich and powerful who lit the match?

Another writer for the magazine, Kate Aronoff, called for fossil fuel executives to be tried for crimes against humanity. “Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide,” she wrote, clarifying that energy CEOs don’t target their victims based on racial or ethnic animus. Yet genocidal land grabs are being carried out to expand “the Red Zone” — the agricultural frontier — eking its way deeper into the Amazon rainforest by way of roads and infrastructure backed by global capital. The Amazon, or the lungs of the earth, as it’s often referred to, is being seized from indigenous communities by mining and agribusiness interests, gutting the resiliency of one of the earth’s last great carbon sinks and producers of oxygen. But who is responsible for burning it? Bolsonaro? Corruption in Brazil? The World Bank? U.S. Financial Firms? Silicon Valley? Could the culprits be named, I wondered? Tried? Read more…