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Earth to Congress

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Livia Gershon | Longreads | December 2018 | 9 minutes (2,149 words)

In recent weeks, protesters have swept across France, burning cars, evading tear gas-wielding riot police, and spraying graffiti across the Arc de Triomphe. Called the “yellow vest” protesters for the safety gear that French law requires drivers to carry, they have drawn much of their support from the countryside. They first mobilized in mid-November, in response to a gas tax hike equivalent to 25-cents-per gallon, which was scheduled to go into effect in January to combat climate change. After not very long, they succeeded in cancelling the tax increase. Since that victory, they have continued to stage rallies, taking on President Emmanuel Macron’s overall economic program, which includes shrinking social programs and rolling back labor protections.

In the United States, conservatives were quick to describe the protests as a repudiation of any and all efforts to address climate change. “The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris,” President Trump tweeted on December 8. “Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting ‘We Want Trump!’ Love France.”

There is, in reality, no reason to believe that anyone in France has chanted Trump’s name as part of the yellow vest movement. And protesters have not expressed opposition to the Paris Agreement as a whole—their official demands include adopting substantive ecological policy rather than “a few piecemeal fiscal measures,” as they wrote in a November 23 communiqué. Still, the protests point to a real danger for the most common approaches to environmental policy, which tend to involve tweaking private economic activity through taxes or regulations. Carbon taxes can be devastating to working-class people, especially outside big cities, if there’s no affordable alternative to gas-fueled cars. Rules limiting coal mining and oil drilling can wreak havoc on communities built on those industries if there are no other local sources of good jobs.

In the U.S., however, there is a chance to drastically cut carbon emissions and help the world transition to an ecologically stable path that accounts for labor interests: the Green New Deal, championed by incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement. The official proposal—really a plan to make a plan, by creating a select committee—won the support of 40 House members. Democratic leadership has watered down the committee’s mandate and rules, but high-profile support from senators like Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders suggest that the Green New Deal is likely to remain politically relevant in 2019 and beyond. The idea represents a rare bid to take on climate change with urgency and determination, reminiscent of the U.S. mobilization for World War II. Already, it has taken comprehensive climate policy—one that factors in working class people—out of the realm of fantasy (or street protest) and into the halls of Congress.

***

The Green New Deal is, at this theoretical stage, full of promises: to completely replace power production with renewable energy; to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation; and to retrofit every residential and industrial building in the country for energy efficiency—all within ten years. Ocasio-Cortez’s outline proposed the virtual elimination of poverty by creating good jobs for all Americans, with a particular focus on workers left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels and people who have been harmed by racial, regional, and gender-based inequality. For good measure, it suggested that the committee might “include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others.”

That’s an awful lot. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas, many of them far less radical than Ocasio-Cortez’s. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, first popularized the phrase “Green New Deal” in 2007. He used it to describe a package of research, loan guarantees, carbon taxes, incentives, and regulations that he hoped would spur environmentally friendly entrepreneurship. President Obama adopted the idea as part of his electoral platform and the 2009 stimulus package, which expanded environmentally friendly infrastructure and entrepreneurship. Ultimately, though, the policy fell far short of putting the country on the road to zero emissions.

Since then, conversations about fighting global warming have typically focused on market-driven solutions, including incentives, subsidies, and, most common of all, some kind of carbon tax. The Democratic Party officially supported such a tax in its 2016 platform, and so do the minority of Republicans who are willing to acknowledge climate change as a threat. Some fossil fuel companies, like ExxonMobil, now say that they support one, too. “To me it’s a kind of smoke screen,” Matt Huber, a geography scholar at Syracuse University who has written about the potential for a Green New Deal, said. “It sort of suggests that this problem can be solved through market pricing, and I’m just not convinced that that’s the case.”

Ocasio-Cortez took up the cause as part of her primary campaign to defeat Joe Crowley, a moderate, from the left. The ambition of her Green New Deal proposal came in line with a report on global warming released in October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations. The report states that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade—the level necessary to reduce the risk of droughts, floods, and other disasters that would affect hundreds of millions of people—“would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

To reach that goal through a carbon tax, the IPCC suggests, the tax would need to be between $135 and $5,500 per ton by 2035. By comparison, the proposed hike that triggered the yellow vest protests would have brought the total carbon tax, at maximum, to the equivalent of about $100 per ton. It’s hard to imagine a tax even at the low end of the IPCC’s range proving politically palatable in most countries.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for a more than a decade, taking different forms to suit various political agendas.

Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped craft the green energy investment portion of Obama’s stimulus plan and has created green jobs plans for a number of states and countries, told me that a Green New Deal for the U.S. that aims to reduce the country’s emissions 50 percent by 2035 would probably cost 1.5 to two percent of GDP per year (though delaying investment could increase that cost). His approach would create 4.2 million jobs, he said, doing everything from building solar and wind installations to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. It would also shrink the fossil fuel industry with a carbon tax and regulation, but workers in those fields would be able to find new, well-paid positions that are carbon neutral. “We need to incorporate the transition side, and it has to be serious,” he said. “We have to take care of the people who are going to be harmed.”

The Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal proposal promised to go further, including a job guarantee that would pay workers a living wage. It also made an overture to “deeply involve” labor unions in training and deploying workers. When Data for Progress, a left-wing think tank, modeled a plan with a similar scope, it projected the creation of ten million jobs over ten years.

***

Given the scale of a progressive vision for a Green New Deal, it’s worth looking at one of the most ambitious U.S. government projects ever: the mobilization for World War II. Federal spending jumped from under ten percent of GDP in 1939 to more than 40 percent in 1944. That’s a much bigger shift than any Green New Deal would bring, but active U.S. involvement in the war lasted only four years. Imagine the 2020s and 2030s as a less intense, more protracted battle against an existential climate threat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that the U.S. would take up arms against the Nazis. But in 1939, that wasn’t at all clear. After Germany invaded Poland that year, prompting Great Britain and France to declare war, nearly half of Americans said the U.S. shouldn’t get involved, even if the Allied Powers were losing. Even after France fell, 79 percent wanted to stay out of the war.

Like climate change deniers today, many opponents of World War II doubted the scope of the problem. Charles Lindbergh, celebrity pilot and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee, argued that a German victory was inevitable and that the Nazis really weren’t so bad anyway. (A 1938 survey found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the Nazi persecution of Jews was at least partly the fault of the Jews themselves.)

And, like the yellow vest protesters in France and the residents of U.S. towns facing the threat of economic disaster if coal and oil industries suddenly disappear, many Americans in 1939 worried about the economic cost of entering, at an unprecedented scale, a foreign fight. In July 1941, most Americans believed that the war would be followed by another great depression. Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara has written that, when President Franklin Roosevelt ramped up military production to aid the Allies, the heads of large manufacturing corporations were hesitant to take on the contracts, as they worried about the increased taxes and federal power that would come with military programs. Some were also sympathetic to America First, or at least hesitant to pick a fight with the isolationists; many were reluctant to bet on the unstable demand from the war effort. “I don’t believe that manufacturers are anxious for war business,” Harvey Campbell, of the Detroit Board of Commerce, said in 1940. “They would rather see a steady line of production and employment.”

Labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal.

 

Labor leaders like Walter Reuther, of the United Auto Workers, seized the moment to push for curbs on laissez faire capitalism, helping yoke private industry to a centralized economic plan. Most unions tied their fate to Roosevelt’s agenda, agreeing to no-strike pledges and putting their backs into the war effort. They were rewarded with perhaps the most labor-friendly economy in U.S. history. Unions went from representing fifteen percent of U.S. workers in 1937 to twenty-seven percent in 1945. The government capped corporate profits. Full employment, combined with government and union anti-discrimination programs, brought new opportunities for black and female workers. Employers eager to retain workers in the face of wartime wage freezes began offering pensions and health insurance.

We can’t go back to 1947, and most of us wouldn’t want to. The era brought segregated suburbs, anti-communist witch hunts against labor and civil rights organizers, and an environmentally disastrous dependence on cars. But the war, in combination with the New Deal that preceded it, established a stable economic order and, crucially, widespread faith in the federal government.

***

Today, labor is a key force behind the drive for a Green New Deal. Much of Pollin’s research, for example, has been commissioned by unions and their supporters. But the unions of 2018 are much smaller and less powerful than their counterparts of 1939, and no Democratic leader has anything like FDR’s popularity. Enacting a comprehensive plan to fight climate change, poverty, and inequality will require strong alliances. Such an effort must bring together environmental activists, communities that have long depended on fossil fuel industries, and economic justice campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the teachers who mobilized across red states in 2017. It will also take collective action, like the sit-ins, which the Sunrise Movement has been holding at Democratic leadership offices.

It will also require more people to vote, in order to persuade the Democratic Party that this level of investment in economically responsible climate policy is a winning strategy. A minority of Americans voted in the 2018 midterms; working-class people and the young are particularly likely to sit out elections. But, Huber said, an agenda with the ambition of a Green New Deal might help bring more of the to the polls. “I’m a big believer that Democrats could do better just by turning out more working-class and poor people,” he told me. “As the Republicans know, the more people vote, the more they lose.”

The good news is, despite decades of anti-green rhetoric from fossil fuel companies and conservative politicians, environmental action is far more popular now than military action was in 1939. Nearly 70 percent of Americans—including 64 percent of Republicans—say that the U.S. should work with other nations to curb climate change, and 55 percent support the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

A Green New Deal—something on the scale of the Ocasio-Cortez outline, with systemic economic changes beyond subsidies and incentives—could utterly transform what comes after it, much as World War II did. It remains to be see what kind of change Congress can usher in.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston GlobeHuffPostAeon and other places.

Editor: Betsy Morais

Fact-checker: Ethan Chiel

Jack, Jacqueline — Dad

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Yvonne Conza | Longreads | December 2018 | 28 minutes (6,875 words)

 

Dad is dying. A cell phone ping alerts me to a terse, fracturing email from my father’s younger brother.

Your Father is in a Florida Hospice. My eyes freeze on the bold subject line as I’m having dinner with a friend at an East Village restaurant. The muffled music and clatter of cutlery become an inescapable tunnel of sound. Childhood memories torpedo my thoughts and conflict with the reality that Dad is close to passing away on the cusp of turning 79. Thirty years of not knowing where or how he lived vanish.

***

To most everyone, John Joseph Downes was Jack, but to a few he was Jacqueline, and to Mom, my three older siblings and me, called “Jackass” behind his back. Dad’s multiplex of enduring identities also include: door-to-door Encyclopedia Britannica salesman; entrepreneur selling jigs, molds, gauges and fixture parts to automotive plants through a business he built from scratch; and the owner of a successful home health care agency. A Buffalo Bills fan, he gave his season tickets to clients while he watched games at home eating cheese curds and pretzels. He was a seeker of public office, wearer of white button-down shirts with wife-beater tanks underneath, actual wife beater, sporadic psoriasis sufferer, excellent provider, entertainer, showoff, lover of culture and a Chivas Regal drinker who, as these wailing memories emerge, will not live two months more to celebrate his New Year’s Eve birthday.

For a few years, Dad donned a hearse-black, trapezoid-contoured toupee that our Russian Blue cat murderously stalked like a sly predator. When askew on Dad’s head, the cat didn’t tamper with the hairpiece. But once it was placed atop Mom’s dresser she pounced on it, battled with double-sided tape and amused all, even Dad, with her mischief. Stored in a cherry wood armoire and draped over a creepy female Styrofoam white mannequin wig stand was Dad’s more notable wig, a dolled up shoulder-length Jackie O. bouffant postiche with satiny strands looped into starched beach waves. Had he added oval, dark, smoke-tinted oversized sunglasses, the look would have been complete.

He had a proclivity towards cross-dressing, a marital joint venture since Mom slipped him into finery that hung inside a shared closet. Though their bedroom door was kept closed, the curtains weren’t pulled down, perhaps intentionally, to spark a pivotal conversation. As a child of 8, I was blindsided by intimate details that felt jarring and amiss. Whenever I put away his freshly laundered socks and t-shirts, I had to open the shuttered double doors of his dresser and be exposed to the cavernous storage area where timepieces and ties kept Jackie O’s foam head company.

When I was not much older, flickering flashes, not belonging to a swarm of fireflies, distracted me from Charlie’s Angels. Looking up to the wide-open windows of my parent’s second floor bedroom I saw Dad accessorized, demure and toying with puckered painted lips. Backlit and indefinably beautiful, he seemed more himself in a size 16 dress than in one of his polyester baby blue or pickle green leisure suits.

Once while snooping for Christmas presents, I discovered Polaroid portraits of Dad as Jackie stashed in a shabby shoebox on the top shelf of my parents’ bedroom closet. Clad in kitten heels, stockings and a conservative, zip-from-behind dress, he had been transformed into a chunky, rarified suggestion of Jacqueline Kennedy. When not embodying Jacqueline, he wore a suit, white shirt and tie, shaved, splashed on decadent amounts of Old Spice.  It was hard for him to keep a clean shave, 5 o’clock shadow always intruding. He bore a resemblance to Don Knotts, the billboard-sized forehead over his eyebrows, which I inherited, displaying struggle, though in a more generous light it beamed with determination. After stuffing pens in his pocket protector, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work he’d go — a tender, paunch bellied dwarf with pick and shovel who knew not to return home until a million diamonds shined, and his worth to his wife could be proven.

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Longreads Best of 2018: Food Writing

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

Zahir Janmohamed
Co-host, The Racist Sandwich Podcast.

There Is No Dalit Cuisine (Sharanya Deepac, Popula)

Sharanya Deepak is one of the most promising, and inspiring food writers, to emerge from India in as long as I can remember. So often, food and travel reporting, both from India and from outside of India, evades questions of caste, gender, and state violence. But Deepak dives right into these topics. In 100 Cups of Tea, for Taste Cooking, she talks about how food traditions are fighting on, even thriving in the midst of India’s brutal violence in the disputed area of Kashmir.  In a lesser writer, this type of story might come off as hokey, but Deepak complicates the narrative, both for Indian and non-Indian readers. My favorite piece of hers, though, is on Dalit cuisine in India for Popula. The word Dalit means “broken” and refers to about 16 percent of the Indian population who are excluded from the Hindu caste system and are often relegated to the most menial jobs in India, such as trash collection. Deepak shows us how food politics—such as the banning of cow slaughter—has been used by upper-caste Brahmins to preserve their hegemony and to deny Dalits agency. She even calls out one of India’s most celebrated food journalists, Vir Sanghvi, who she says, “reveres the upper-class and colonial vision of Indian cuisine.” This piece, and all of her pieces, is journalism at its best: uncomfortable, layered, and fearless


Naz Riahi
Writer, Consultant, Founder of Bitten.

Can We Honor Your Service with a Steak, Malibu Chicken, or the Jumpo Crispy Shrimp? (Erin Clare Brown, Eater)

This piece encompasses so much that is lovely and so much that is brutal. On its surface Brown and her father go to Sizzler’s on Veterans’ Day for the free steak, a promotion to honor those who’ve served. In that, we are placed in midst of all that is heartbreaking about America, with its promise of opportunity juxtaposed against its exploitative reality. Brown and her father, in brief moments that punctuate long silences on the subject, discuss his service in the Vietnam War. In this essay, Brown explores her complicated feelings on the subject, her relationship with her father and, perhaps, the marketing machine he inadvertently fought for.


John T. Edge
Author of The Potlikker Papers, Columnist, Oxford American.

Houston Is the New Capital of Southern Cool (Brett Martin, GQ)

This piece gave me new perspective on a city I dearly love, a place I wrote about for the Oxford American — early in this era of Houston-is-Cool revelations. I was proud of that piece and the insights I offered. But this essay is so dang much better. It’s smart and circuitous and searching, a string of observations that could be used to describe Houston itself.


 

Irina Dumitrescu
Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn, whose work has appeared in Best Food Writing and Best American Essays.

Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, The New Yorker)

Those of us who like to read food writing are probably all tired of the Great Cliché: misty memories of grandma in the kitchen, stirring a pot of fragrant, utterly authentic stew from the Old Country. At the same time, food remains such a useful symbol of our entangled connections to the families and cultures that made us. The reminiscence of a meal includes barely recoverable flavors and scents, ephemeral gestures of care, and, occasionally, flashes of perfect belonging.

Michelle Zauner stumbles across her memories in H Mart, the Korean American supermarket chain. She mourns her mother among dumpling skins and refrigerators stocked with banchan. Her madeleine is the puffed-rice snack ppeongtwigi, which she used to nibble after school. A grandmother slurping jjamppong noodle soup in the food court reminds Zauner of the old age her own mother never reached. This beautiful, delicately observed essay shows how many stories are still left to be told about food, what rich associations are still to be found in immigrant restaurants and strip malls and suburban kitchens, in places “where you can find your people under one odorous roof.”


Melissa Chadburn
Essayist, Novelist.

The Tyranny and the Comfort of Government Cheese (Bobbi Dempsey, TASTE)

I grew up in poverty. I grew up with my mother’s bounced check, a scarlet letter, taped to a wall behind the check-out at the Food King. I grew up washing out stains in the bathroom sink with hot water and a bar of soap, scrubbing until my knuckles bled, sharpening pencils with a steak knife, sucking on Kool-Aid and Country Time Lemonade off my licked wet fingers dipped into a sandwich bag. I want to tell these stories, these stories need to be told, these stories are my bones, and I’m so delighted that food outlets like TASTE are publishing them.

Dear Baby Witch (Sara Finnerty, r.kv.r.y.)

I read this wrapped in grief. We’d just unexpectedly had to put a magical dog down. And I was going through a phase of hating myself taking diet pills and checking my weight frequently. The idea of eating seemed too close to letting love in, and letting love in seemed like it was reserved for someone who was not me, and Sara Finnerty wrote this beautiful essay and came to my door bearing a platter of homemade Chicken Parmesan and very specific heating instructions, and reading about a young girl kneading gnocchi in the basement with her grandmother was just the reminder I needed to continue to reach for whatever neat thing might be around the corner.


Sara B. Franklin
Writer and professor of food studies at NYU based in Kingston, NY. 

A Cajun Seasoned Boil for a Big Party (Samin Nosrat, The New York Times Magazine)

I love Samin Nosrat’s approach to writing, cooking, and life. Nosrat knows a lot —she is, after all, a bestselling cookbook author and a Netflix personality. But in her column for the Times, she approaches her subjects with great openness and genuine curiosity; you can tell she’s still hungry to learn. In an industry whose celebrities often distinguish themselves by asserting their status with obnoxious, meaningless language like “toothsome,” “mouthfeel,” and “unctuous,” Nosrat aims for approachability and humility. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in her column about Mississippi River boat pilot-cum-home cook extraordinaire, Jared Austin. In just 1,000 short words, she captures Austin in his full humanity — as idiosyncratic, unique, and hospitable as his hometown of New Orleans. (I mean, “And yes, ‘bead’ is a verb.” Come on!) In this moment when we’re questioning all the characteristics traditionally associated with power and authority, Nosrat reminds us that humility is an asset, and for that, I’m thankful.


Aaron Gilbreath
Longreads Editor, Essayist.

Hazardous Cravings (Alex McElroy, Tin House)

In a genre that includes celebrity chef profiles, best of lists, and Yelp reviews, personal essays like Alex McElroy’s prove how deep food stories can go. Growing up overweight, McElroy had a very American predicament: surrounded by food, he ate too much, and people made fun of him for it, and yet, as his weight made him a target of ridicule, his eventual dieting threatened them, and people both encouraged him to lose weight and pressured him to share in their gluttony. While working at a Dairy Queen, he became eating disordered and bulimic. In this powerful, intelligent, devilishly funny essay, McElroy calls dieting “a paradox of masculinity and emasculation.” By exploring his relationship with food and his own flesh, he shows how people mistake his large personal space for public space, and how he struggled to value what others, including himself, had mistreated for so long. It’s an incredible, memorable portrait of a journey in the land of too much food, constrictive gender norms, and body shaming, and it’s unusual to hear it told by a man. It’s also about identity: how our past selves cast an inescapable shadow over our future selves, despite who we become.

 * * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

The Redemption of MS-13

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Danny Gold | Longreads | December 2018 | 23 minutes (6,393 words)

This article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

We meet the Pastor* in a Pollo Campero, the famous Central American fried chicken restaurant. It is necessary to negotiate with him to enter the neighborhood, a notorious MS-13 stronghold, and then it is necessary for him to negotiate with the gang leaders to bring us in. In El Salvador’s poor neighborhoods, unofficial borderlines are everywhere. Navigating them takes a certain level of finesse.

It is tempting to think you can just drive through a neighborhood without a problem, that you can get in and out without alarms being raised. But this is not the case. The gangs see everything, and anyone on the street can be an informer. The penalty for trespassing can be death.

The neighborhood we are planning to enter is regarded by some as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. Strangely, the Pastor tells us that the neighborhood is actually relatively safe for residents, since the area is completely controlled by MS. It is the gray areas being fought over, where gangs bump up against one another, that are the most violent. When we enter the neighborhood, the Pastor jokingly says, “Welcome to the most secure place in the country.”

All four windows are rolled down. Windows always need to be down in gang neighborhoods. They have to know who you are. The lookouts are everywhere. The Pastor points them out: a child, an old woman, a shopkeeper. “Everyone here is involved,” the Pastor says. A young man in a baggy polo and jeans speaks on his cell phone as we pass. “Un soldado,” the Pastor says. A soldier.


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There are up to 60,000 active gang members in El Salvador, according to the International Crisis Group, with another 500,000 people in the country connected to the gangs. This, in a country with a population of just 6.4 million.

The Pastor is a tough-looking man, with a shaved head, solid upper body, and a gold chain dangling on his chest, clad in a polo shirt and dark jeans. He is well respected and is even able to go to other gang-controlled neighborhoods. He wanted to do a beach trip that day, but the idea of taking some of his former gang-member congregants, many of them heavily tattooed, proved too taxing.

In El Salvador’s poor neighborhoods, unofficial borderlines are everywhere. Navigating them takes a certain level of finesse.

We are with the Pastor because he has agreed to take us into his neighborhood so my photographer and I can follow him as he walks the streets of the slums, trying to convince residents and gang members to become born-again Christians. In El Salvador, Jesus saves. For the young men caught up in the vicious cycle of violence perpetrated by gangs like MS-13, the church is the only thing that can save them. Embracing Jesus Christ and becoming a born-again Christian is the one way that gang members will allow one of their own to leave and strike out for a better life.

Pastor William Arias. Photo by Neil Brandvold.

In the slums of El Salvador, in the jails, in the poverty-stricken rural villages, a revolution of sorts is happening. Based on who you talk to, it’s either the only salvation for El Salvador’s tens of thousands of violent gang members, or it’s a con intended to stop them from facing retribution for terrorizing their fellow countrymen for years in brutal, heinous ways.

***

A brief history of the gangs, how they came to be, and the havoc they have wrought across the country: El Salvador went through a brutal civil war in the 1980s between leftist guerillas and a right-wing government backed by an oligarchy and the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the country as refugees, with many ending up in Los Angeles. There were already a number of Salvadoran gangs in existence there, among them MS-13 and 18th Street, but they were small scale, sometimes just a group of friends who partied together. The gangs grew exponentially during this time with the sudden influx of poor, sometimes battle-scarred refugees, and they served as protection against black and Mexican gangs. A change in immigration law in the United States in the 1990s saw hundreds of gang members deported back to El Salvador, a country reeling from the war, which ended in 1992 and left a serious power vacuum and weak institutions. The gangs took advantage and spread out, increasing in numbers. The murder rate also rose dramatically, and in 2015 and 2016 El Salvador had the highest of in any peacetime country. For comparison, El Salvador, a country of just over 6 million people, had 6,600 murders in 2015. New York City, with a population of 8.5 million, had approximately 350 murders.

The gangs see everything, and anyone on the street can be an informer. The penalty for trespassing can be death.

The Pastor has been on the frontlines of this battle. The Church has always had a strange relationship with the gangs, with pastors and church groups being the only organizations allowed to work in gang-controlled communities or to advocate for gang member’s rights, negotiating truces. Somewhere along the line, gang leaders decided that if a member found God, he would be permitted to leave. Gang members and church officials will both tell you that the church is one of the few things the gang respects. Often, church organizations are the only groups allowed to provide community services to residents in gang areas, with nearly all NGOs and the government prohibited from doing so.

And that is how the Pastor is allowed to spend this particular morning attempting to convince a young gang member to abandon his allegiance to MS-13 and welcome Jesus Christ into his heart without fear that he will be executed for his transgression, even going so far as to dare him to scrawl an “18” on the wall (MS-13’s rivals are the 18th Street gang, which has split into two factions: 18th Street Revolutionarios and 18th Street Surenos).

The Pastor says he is friends with some of the gang members, but he can never grow too friendly. He never accepts favors. Never does favors. Never asks for money, never gives money. He has known many of them since they were little and growing up in the neighborhood. It is necessary to be on good terms with them to operate here, but that doesn’t mean he does not tread lightly. “Preaching on adrenaline is not easy,” he says.

He walks the streets with some of his flock to head deeper into the barrio. Paved, wide streets with murals listing the Ten Commandments turn into narrow dirt roads with unrelenting poverty. A man with a shovel tries to clear an open trench where raw sewage flows next to his home. Corrugated tin shacks with walls that are nothing more than vinyl banners of corona promotions hung on chain-link fences. Stray dogs and chickens pick through garbage-strewn streets.

The Pastor stops to talk to a mother and her son standing in the doorway of their home. The boy is young, maybe 11 years old, but this is the age when the gangs start to make inroads with young people. In a neighborhood like this, it is not very hard for them. There are few opportunities. The Pastor realizes that this is a crucial age for the boy, when the everyday decisions he makes can determine whether or not he lives to make it out of his teens. “The life of a person, if I bring God to them, if I take Jesus to them it means that something different is going to happen. It’s not going to be the same result,” the Pastor says. If the Pastor does not reach the boy, the gangs have an easy target to recruit.

Somewhere along the line, gang leaders decided that if a member found God, he would be permitted to leave. Gang members and church officials will both tell you that the church is one of the few things the gang respects

The next stop is a gang member who looks to be about 18 years old. He politely entertains the Pastor’s aggressive conversion pitch. The Pastor is trying to convince him he must fear God more than he fears the gangs, for it is God that truly has the authority. “Put an 18 up here,” the Pastor says to him, encouraging the boy to scrawl the mark of a rival gang on a nearby wall. “They’d kill me,” the teenager replies.

“You are afraid of them, right? You have fear that they would punish you? Yes or no?”

The teenager nods. “But you aren’t afraid that God will punish you?” The Pastor keeps going, trying to get the teenager to accept Jesus. He tells him he should accept God now, before it is too late, before he is put up on the cross to be crucified. The teen is noncommittal, and they part ways.

***

The Church has always had a strange relationship with the gangs in El Salvador, and has often been seen as a somewhat neutral arbitrator. Church officials have helped negotiate gang truces and have always been on the frontlines of conflict here. Many here actually trace the key moment that began the civil war to the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, a tireless advocate for El Salvador’s downtrodden, who was killed by a sniper while delivering mass.

Romero, unlike the Pastor and the majority of churches who work with the gangs, was Catholic. He was also a vocal proponent of liberation theology, a movement that rose up during the ’60s and ’70s in Latin American Catholicism and preached social justice, standing up against political and economic oppression. The movement came together nicely with leftist movements that were rising up in El Salvador, but soon put the Catholic Church at odds with the right-wing government and oligarchy that ruled the country.

El Salvador’s right-wing elites and the government, backed by the United States, fought a vicious war against the left-wing guerilla groups. They also promoted Evangelicalism as an alternative to Catholicism while simultaneously persecuting Catholics. Whereas liberation theology was encouraging the poor to rise up and fight for their rights, Evangelicalism focused more on having people accept their fate and leave it up to God — exactly the kind of message that would discourage participation in social justice movements. U.S. Evangelicals came down to preach in waves, and there are even accusations, never proven, that the CIA was involved in promoting the Evangelical movement. From 1988 to 2009, Evangelical Protestants went from 17 percent of El Salvador’s population to 35 percent. Estimates now put the number at 40 percent.

And it is growing. “You could say that every day in this country, dozens of men are leaving the gangs, looking for the right path in the arms of the lords,” Pastor William Arias tells me. His numbers may be a bit exaggerated, but if there is anyone who knows the burgeoning evangelical movement among gang members, it is Pastor Arias, having been a member of MS-13 for 15 years. This is not hard to surmise, as the letters ‘M’ and ‘S’ are tattooed on his forehead. Two teardrops are under his left eye, and there’s a spider web behind his right ear. Beneath his collared shirt and blazer, across his prodigious stomach, are a host of other MS-13 tattoos including a fairly large hand doing the devil’s horn fingers that has become the gang’s signature hand sign.

It is a cloudy day when the Pastor introduces us to Pastor Arias. Arias is a friendly man, all smiles and handshakes, with a gravelly voice that carries years of hard living. Pastor Arias leads us to his home, a tense walk past a gathering place for some of the local gang members. Though not exactly fond of having journalists in their neighborhood, they begrudgingly accept those with the pastors as long as they are not photographed.

The house is a small two-bedroom shack, with a dirt floor. Living the life of a convert does not appear easy. These men go from being able to demand payment from anyone in the neighborhood to living in poverty, with barely enough money to feed themselves.

Arias is now heavyset and broad-shouldered, but he shows us photos of himself as a young gangster. He is thin and muscular, with his head shaven, arms crossed, and staring into the camera in front of a large piece of MS-13 graffiti. Arias is what they call an OG, or original gangster. He claims to have been jumped in to the gang in 1990 by one of the founding members in the country. He was 11 years old.

Arias’s tale of getting wrapped up in gang life and later finding an exit through the Church, echoes what I’ve heard from nearly every former gang member I’ve interviewed. There are certain highlights that arise in the stories of every gang member turned Christian: a poor family, a rough childhood, and acceptance into the gang at a young age. Violence. Drug addiction. Depression. Jail. Near-death experience. Survival. Awakening.

Pastor Arias came from a poor, broken family. His mother was always working, and his father was addicted to alcohol and drugs. He took to the streets at 7, and was addicted to sniffing glue a few years after that. That’s when he found himself in the company of MS-13.

“When you’re young, you need someone to listen to you, to respect you. That’s what I was looking for, people to fear me and respect me,” Pastor Arias says. Many gang members, like Arias, speak of joining the gang as if they were searching for a family, of some sort of structure. As the writer and researcher Stephen Dudley illustrates in a groundbreaking report on MS-13, and in an op-ed in the New York Times, the gang can be thought of as a social organization more than a criminal enterprise. Dudley, who runs the Insight Crime website, says that the gangs function as a type of surrogate family.

There are certain highlights that arise in the stories of every gang member turned Christian: a poor family, a rough childhood, and acceptance into the gang at a young age. Violence. Drug addiction. Depression. Jail. Near-death experience. Survival. Awakening.

That’s not to downplay the allure of money and power to gang recruits. These days, Pastor Arias adds, the poverty is so overwhelming in neighborhoods like his that some mothers push their children into the gang life.

Pastor Arias says the first hint of his conversion came in 1999, after serving a three-year sentence. He was still heavily addicted to drugs when he got out, but his brother, another gang member, had become a Christian. His brother tried to win him over, but he wanted none of it. “I told him I didn’t need any God, that the only thing I needed was the hood and the hood was my family, and that he better not talk to me again because he had betrayed me by leaving the gang,” says Pastor Arias.

At the same time, he was battling addiction and crippling depression. He was paranoid, always worried that the police or rival gang members were plotting to execute him. He remembers attending a huge party one night, and walking outside alone. “Everything was quiet, there was an emptiness,” he says. “I felt so alone, I felt like less than trash.” He heard a voice, urging him to kill himself. The next morning, he was arrested and eventually sentenced to eight years in prison.

The next few years were hell. Nobody visited him, he said, except for his mother — and God. Prison conditions were atrocious, and Arias says it was a constant battle between life and death. One night, he thought he was being set up to be murdered, and he prayed to God and swore that that if he lived he would convert to Christianity. He survived, and shortly after he was freed on a technicality. He converted when he got out.

But the transition from former gang member to law-abiding Christian was not an easy one. Former gang members face social stigma. Many in El Salvador are not so willing to forgive. It is one thing to speak of redemption when the gangs have not preyed on your community. It is another when they have targeted you and your loved ones. Pastor Arias doesn’t blame them either. “It’s hard because the gang has planted so much fear and suffering that it’s hard to forgive. Especially me. I hurt my community so bad in the past,” he says.

Can he forgive himself, I ask. He finds comforts in the Lord’s words. He does not hold onto your sins, he says, he throws them away.

The issue of earning a living is a bit more challenging, especially when your only means of income have been violence and drugs. There are few government programs, and it’s almost impossible for former gang members to get normal jobs. Pastor Arias recalls not being able to pay his bills. “When you’re in a gang, it’s basically easy. Money, whatever you need. I would only need to go out in the corner and people would give me money,” he says. The temptation to go back to the gang life is ever present.

Now, though, things have changed. Whereas at one point his own family did not think he would last six months as a law-abiding convert, local parents trust him to take their children to Sunday school. “When He forgives you, He doesn’t hold on to your sins. He throws them away deep, he doesn’t remember what you did,” says Pastor Arias. “That comforts me, even though society doesn’t believe in me, even though they don’t approve the change, because you are aware that your past life doesn’t exist anymore.”

His own daughter is about to graduate from secondary school, where she studies accounting, and go to college next year. Her photo and various awards she’s won are everywhere in Pastor Arias’s tiny living room. He calls her the pride of the family. “She’s a great example for me,” he says.

The following Sunday, Pastor Arias invites us to his church service, located down a dirt path from his home.

Whereas at one point his own family did not think he would last six months as a law-abiding convert, local parents trust him to take their children to Sunday school.

Outside the church, a boy catches my eye. He looks to be about 14 years old and is dressed the way that young gang members do. I’m told that he’s a lookout, keeping an eye on the foreign journalists with the cameras. It is unnerving, and I start to wonder just how accepted outsiders are in the barrio even with the consent of the pastors.

A short time later, two suit-wearing men approach the teenager from inside the church and drape their arms around him. They escort him into the church and have him kneel right below the podium. He is joined by another young teenager who seems far more willing. Pastor Arias is preaching from behind the podium, extremely animated, screaming and sweating, his gravelly voice echoing through the room. “The easiest prey for the devil is the youth!” he booms into the microphone. The crowd nods enthusiastically.

Both teenagers are about to receive Jesus, to be born again, in front of the congregation. One teenager begins to cry. Pastor Arias blesses them. “You know what the devil is saying today? Now those two escaped me! Only a little more and I would have had them but I couldn’t because the hand of Jesus saved them!” The crowd applauds. A small victory for Pastor Arias.

The young lookout walks outside the church and hugs his grandmother, who is also crying. I approach him to talk, but he is nervous and says he can’t be seen talking to us. A few minutes later, two active gang members walk by, clearly sent to investigate the situation. The boy is nervous. Now he may be the target. While the gangs mostly accept the evangelical route of escape, it does not mean that it is something they all celebrate.

As Pastor Arias explains to us, “It’s the only way out of the gang since the gang has only three exits: One is prison, two is a hospital, and three is death. The only way out alive is through God, and the gangs know perfectly that there isn’t another way.”

Like Pastor Arias, most gang members only come to realize this while incarcerated. Prison is where the majority of reformed gang members find it in their hearts to find Jesus. The Apanteos prison is located about an hour outside of San Salvador. It is an MS-13 prison. In El Salvador, the prisons are divided by gang membership. Mixing the two together is far too dangerous. Gotera, an 18th Street prison, has become famous for its Christian converts, with some saying it numbers over 1,200.

***

On a balmy day in May, we’re led into a section of prison where approximately 300 former members of MS-13, clad in white shirts and white shorts, alternate between praying fervently and listening to fiery preachers deliver sermons. It is quite a compelling scene. To say the men are enthusiastic would be an understatement. They sing hymns as loud as their voices will let them. They clap so hard their hands must throb. Some have tears streaming down their tattooed faces.

Incarcerated men at the Apanteos prison, which houses MS-13 gang members. Photo by Neil Brandvold.

The government of El Salvador has initiated a program called Yo Cambio, or “I Change,” in the prisons. It is part of a massive effort to teach gang members new skills like forestry, basic carpentry, sewing, and masonry, and how to be productive members of society. We watch team-building exercises, the kind of things you’d see at a corporate retreat. Trust falls. A dance performance. There are nice gardens being kept in an open courtyard. The young men are smiling, laughing, and generally having a good time. It is not the type of thing one expects to see in prison in El Salvador, though the productions are clearly staged for our benefit. We are not allowed into the sectors where active gang members are housed. And while we are at this prison, rumors swirl of grievous human rights violations occurring at the maximum-security prisons where gang leaders are held and journalists are not allowed. At one point during the reporting trip, a local journalist shows us a photo alleged to be of a gang leader locked up. The man is rail thin, and accusations are made that the prison system is starving him and other gang leaders. There is only the carrot and the stick here. Nothing in between. Repent or die.

Aware of all this, it is still hard not to be impressed. We are accompanied by only one guard and the prison director, a short, middle-aged woman. We are surrounded by one-time members of the most fearsome gang in the Americas, and there are no issues or concerns for our safety as we wander around this section of the prison.

We ask the prison director to speak to the most fearsome reformed gang member she could think of. Jaime Salvador Ceron Orlanna has been sentenced to 71 years and has served nine years of his sentence. He speaks with a tic that makes him constantly blink. He was a gang member for 25 years, he says. “When I look at myself in the mirror, I never thought I could ever change having done those evil deeds in the gang,” he adds. He thought he would die a member.

Jaime describes his previous life of “parties and murders,” of having seen an “infinite” number of young teenagers killed simply for not obeying a gang member. He now calls himself a “recycled human,” adding that before finding Jesus, he was “human garbage.” Asked whether or not he thinks society can forgive him and his fellow converts, he’s unsure. He swears he is sorry and recognizes he’s been a part of his homeland’s destruction “for having been the root of this evil that now takes over the country.”

He shows off a giant MS-13 tattoo on his back that contains satanic images and references to the Illuminati, which he used to believe in. There are always talks among the former gang members of making deals with the devil, of the devil taking over a person. The occult figures somewhat into MS-13 lore, from the devil horn signs to other more satanic imagery. For these men, with some of the things they’ve done, the devil and his work is more a than metaphor. It’s real, whispering in their ears, convincing them to commit heinous acts and now perhaps trying to convince them to go back to their old ways. What better way to stave off the devil than to commit to Evangelicalism?

Nearby, the prisoners have broken into groups of 15 or so people, with various preachers and pastors in training practicing sermons to a small audience. A short man with intricate tattoos crawling up his throat warns of not falling victim to temptation. “The word of God says that Satan, the devil, took Jesus to the desert to tempt him, and the will of the enemy is to tempt us with hollow things. Maybe when we leave here tomorrow someone will say, ‘I have a deal’ or ‘You can steal that car and nothing will happen, you ask God’s forgiveness later and everything is okay.’ Those are the hollow temptations of the enemy, and how they’ll try to seduce us.”

The incarcerated converts are all aware that remaining on the path on the outside is not as simple as it is on the inside. Temptations are found in abundance, and rehabilitation programs are not. A frequent complaint heard from former gang members is that there are little to no options for gang members once they are released. They say the government provides no training or job placement program, and social stigma prevents them from gaining employment in a country that already has a lack of opportunities for even upstanding citizens without criminal records.

For these men, with some of the things they’ve done, the devil and his work is more a than metaphor. It’s real, whispering in their ears, convincing them to commit heinous acts and now perhaps trying to convince them to go back to their old ways.

Wilfredo Gomez is painfully aware of the circumstances that converted gang members face upon release in El Salvador when he greets Jorge Luis Migran, a young former member of 18th Street who was just released a week prior after serving three years of what was initially an 11-year sentence. Migran was initially sentenced for homicide, extortion, and a host of other charges, though many were dropped. He says he made a pact with God to get off drugs and after failing the very next day, he got sober after that and has now been clean for five months. What saved him was being transferred to a prison with more converts and gaining better treatment. “I looked at the future and I wanted to be someone,” he says. “I was tired of crime.” He is worried, though, about getting a job and providing for his 3-year-old son, who he was only recently able to meet. And he is worried about the lure of women and drugs.

Gomez oversees a program that will house Migran and help him stay on the straight and narrow path. He lives in and runs a rehabilitation center in the Eben-Ezer Church inside the notorious 18th Street neighborhood known as La Dina, an area so notorious for gang violence that even hardened Salvadoran crime journalists were apprehensive to venture inside last time I went. The church is an oasis in a crime-plagued neighborhood, though even with permission from the local 18th Street clique to visit it’s unwise to venture more than a block or two in any direction.

It serves as a base and home for the recently released converts to live and work. It also doubles as a bakery, where the converts who lack employment opportunities bake pastries daily to sell at local shops. Bakeries have become something of a typical business for former gang members, so much so that police officers crack jokes about yet another gang-run bakeshop. It allows the gang members to earn a living, just a couple of dollars a day. Entering the church most days, we were met by cheery former gang members, giant 18s tattooed across their face, basting freshly made pastries with syrupy concoctions.

Gomez himself is a former gang member who now preaches at the church and oversees much of the operation. If there is a biography that captures the life cycle of El Salvador’s gangs, it is most definitely Gomez’s. Born in the country, at age 10 he fled with his family as refugees during the civil war of the 1980s and ended up in South Central Los Angeles. Gomez describes how he thought everything would be OK when he reached the states, but he soon found himself in a neighborhood where violence and poverty dominated the environment as well.

A participant in Wilfredo Gomez’s program. Photo by Neil Brandvold.

His family life soon fractured. His parents divorced, and Gomez often found himself alone. He was also bullied by others in the neighborhood for being Salvadoran. “Being in the States and being Salvadoran, not knowing the language or the culture, it put pressure on me, and I found a way to fit in or to belong or to feel part of by having different types of friends. That’s how I initiated friendship with gangs and gang members and girls that sympathized with gangs.”

Gomez estimates that there were 20 different gangs in his junior high. He lived on the corner of 18th Street and Union in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the 18th Street gang, though he had yet to join them when he was assaulted after school one day because rival gang members had suspected he was already a member of 18th Street. Members of 18th Street in his neighborhood saw him banged up and took him under their wing, going with him to get revenge and offering protection in the future.

From there, he was a full-fledged member. Arrests and incarceration soon followed, with Gomez going in and out of institutions until he was deported in 2006. When he arrived back in the country, it had been 20 years since his family fled. Police met him at the airport, took photos, and warned him that the situation down there was different, that because of his tattoos he would be targeted.

Life back in El Salvador wasn’t easy. Gomez was living in a cheap motel and unable to find work. He ran out of money, and felt himself drifting back into a life of crime. He had no connections to the gangs back in El Salvador though, and considered himself unaffiliated. He was scared to leave the motel, scared he would be kidnapped and killed by any gang that saw his tattoos. Fed up one night, he went to a bar and got drunk. There, he met members of 18th Street who asked him to go with them and join up. Skeptical at first, he gave in when they showed him their various “18” tattoos.

A few months later, he was back in prison. “I lasted like three months and twenty days free out here [El Salvador]. I got sentenced to ten years in prison for strong-armed robbery. I went to prison out here and believe me, prison out here ain’t no joke, nothing like the States,” he says.

In prison, there were eight beds for every 50 people. The conditions were awful. The food inedible, the bathroom situation so atrocious he won’t even begin to describe it, and he constantly had fungal infections. But he had a bit of notoriety due to his status as a deportee and his size. He fell into the prison life, sometimes using his size to his advantage, and won respect from other gang members. But five or six years into his sentence, he got horribly sick.

In prison, there were eight beds for every 50 people.

The sickness was Gomez’s wake-up call. The other gang members, sensing his weaknesses, mocked him and treated him poorly. The Christians inside kept trying to pray for him but he turned them down. His body kept breaking down. He later found out he had tuberculosis.

One night, he was coughing up more fluids than usual, feeling a great “white heat” on his body. “I was crying, and I remember one of them [the Christians], he whispered to my ear, and he was like, ‘Do you want to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior? He wants to heal you. He wants to save you. You’re not going to die.’ Dude, I don’t remember but I told him, ‘Yes, I do.’ Then I received Jesus as my lord and savior that day, and here I am, what four years later? Healthy as a bull, with a different mentality, with a different life, and now I know God is real.”

Gomez started preaching in jail, seeing it as his newfound purpose. Because of his previous notoriety, he developed a reputation of sorts; the badass, fierce deportee who woke up one morning and found Jesus. Other prisoners were touched by his story. “I’m a leader again, but not for the darkness, not for evil,” he says. “I’m a leader now for the light, for the good.”

The idea for the program at Eben-Ezer Church came to him the day he was released. Not expecting anyone to be outside the prison waiting for him, Gomez was shocked to find members of the church there. “Here comes this pastor and he tells me, ‘We’ve been waiting for you. We heard what you’ve been doing in there, and we heard what God is doing in there, and we’re here to help you.’ I was like, wow. I never had a family. I never had nobody waiting for me when I got out of prison, not even in the States.”

Other prisoners were touched by his story. ‘I’m a leader again, but not for the darkness, not for evil,’ he says. ‘I’m a leader now for the light, for the good.’

He was inspired to start doing the same for other ex-gang-members-turned-Christians getting out of jail. There’s now 11 of them staying at the church. Gomez sees it as a halfway house, to help those recently released get started and adjust so they don’t fall back into the same traps. They provide food, shelter, and guidance, and the hope is that the newly released will soon be on their way. But many gang members no longer have family members willing to take them in or are not able to gain any sort of employment, especially those with many tattoos. “If they have no family, if they really have no family, they have no economy [economic prospects], no one to help, they can stay,” Gomez says.

Others are scared of threats, and the church provides a refuge. Becoming an evangelical Christian, however, is not a panacea for gang members looking to escape retaliation for previous acts of violence in general, though being a church member does afford some protection. Reformed gang members can still be targeted by rival gang factions and on occasion even by members of their own gang who are upset they have left too abruptly or think that they have converted to escape a debt or internal punishment.

Former gang members must never be seen wavering from their commitment to Christ. If a gang member is seen out hitting on women at a bar or drinking or doing drugs, anything that may give cause to suspect the commitment to living a pure lifestyle, it can set them up for a death sentence. There is also the matter of police, many of whom think once a gang member always a gang member, or who suspect anyone with tattoos as being an active member.

Because of this Gomez keeps all members of his church under strict rules. They are forbidden from doing anything that could put the church in jeopardy and make it appear as if he and his congregation are harboring active gang members. Any violation of the rules, and a gang member can be kicked out. He doesn’t blame anyone for being suspicious, either, but he knows in his heart they are on the right path.

“I used to love the gang, I used to say the gang was in my blood,” he says. “I used to hate MS-13. I used to think about destroying them, dropping a bomb on them like Hiroshima. But now, all I want to do is preach to them and tell them Jesus loves them.”

When Gomez converted, he says there were maybe only a few dozen members of 18th Street that had converted to Christianity. Now in the 18th street prison Gotera, there are upward of 1,000. “Something’s happening. Something is really happening,” he says with an incredulous chuckle. “I dream one day of having an area or a building where I can house both of them, where I could have MS-13 and 18th Street together worshipping the Lord without any restrictions, without any fear in their hearts.”

As I speak to Gomez, the former gang members are doing errands around the church’s common spaces, sweeping and mopping up the floors, cooking for one another, and getting ready for church services. It has the feel of a frat house, albeit one filled with well-behaved frat boys. Some are retiling the floor, others painting some of the walls. As the church service start draws near, those with more egregious tattoos apply makeup to cover their faces while others take out their nicest button-down shirts and iron them, stopping to apply cologne.

With the men joking around and laughing as they clean and get ready for the day, it’s hard to reconcile the scene with the knowledge of their crimes. What to make of the men here, or the converts in general? Some of whom have killed, not just killed in a war or for profit or shot a man in the head, but tortured, butchered, chopped up men into little pieces, and now tell you that he found love in Jesus and is a changed man? Men with 666 tattoos on their foreheads basting pastries, mopping floors, and smiling as they bring you coffee and ice cream cake to celebrate a roommate’s birthday? Is redemption even possible?

When the church service begins, a steady rain is pouring down. A warm-up band wails on electric guitars as their singer, dressed in emo fashion with windswept bangs, sings emotional pop-punk odes to Jesus. Men with full faces of tattoos sing along next to old grandmothers from the neighborhood. Wilfredo is nervously studying his notes for a sermon he will give. One former gang member holds his newborn baby in his tattooed forearms, a bandage over an eye that was shot. The bullet is still in there.

That night, Jorge Luis Migran is welcomed to the group. All the former gang members line up to shake his hand and welcome him to the flock. There are smiles and tears. He won’t have an easy time adjusting, but for now he looks to have escaped El Salvador’s vicious gang wars.

A few weeks later, a member of the program is gunned down right outside the church. The rumor is that it was a hit by MS-13. Later that month, another recently released convert is brought to the church.

*Some details, including the name of this Pastor, have been withheld for safety reasons.

***

Danny Gold is a journalist and documentary producer. He is a 2018 Pulitzer Center grantee for reporting on gangs in El Salvador.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Overdose Video: America’s Latest Genre of Horror Film

Getty Images

Drug addicted people passed out, actively overdosing, have recently become the subject of police and amateur videographers in America. The lurid footage — often including the children of the drug addicted for heightened effect — gets posted on YouTube and other social media channels and naturally invites the cruel, nasty, mean-spirited comments you’d expect from an anonymous online mob ready to judge without even a cursory understanding of who the user is or what they’ve endured thus far.

Capturing video of someone at the worst possible moment of their lives sure seems like a gross indignity and invasion of privacy, and as Katharine Q. Seelye, Julie Turkewitz, Jack Healy, and Alan Blinder report at the New York Times, the public shaming and humiliation has had mixed results in encouraging the drug addicted to get help and get clean. The videos do have one lasting effect: a source of shame users’ children will have to endure for the rest of their lives.

In Lawrence, Mass., a former mill town at the heart of New England’s opioid crisis, the police chief released a particularly gut-wrenching video. It showed a mother who had collapsed from a fentanyl overdose sprawled out in the toy aisle of a Family Dollar while her sobbing 2-year-old daughter tugged at her arm.

“It’s heartbreaking,” James Fitzpatrick, who was the Lawrence police chief at the time, told reporters in September 2016. “This is definitely evidence that shows what addiction can do to someone.”

Mandy McGowan, 38, knows that. She was the mother unconscious in that video, the woman who became known as the “Dollar Store Junkie.” But she said the video showed only a few terrible frames of a complicated life.

Ms. McGowan had only seen snippets of the video on the news. But two months later, she watched the whole thing. She felt sick with regret.

“I see it, and I’m like, I was a piece of freaking [expletive],” she said. “That was me in active use. It’s not who I am today.”

But she also wondered: Why didn’t anyone help her daughter? She was furious that bystanders seemed to feel they had license to gawk and record instead of comforting her screaming child.

“I know what I did, and I can’t change it,” she said. “I live with that guilt every single day. But it’s also wrong to take video and not help.”

Read the story

Longreads Best of 2018: Profiles

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

Sarah Smarsh
Journalist Sarah Smarsh has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, and many other publications.
Smarsh’s first book, Heartland, was long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction.

William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump (Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker)

The intersection of class, race, and religion — what could be more fraught in these times? Cobb’s rare combination of quiet wisdom and a steady journalistic hand is the perfect guide. He profiles Protestant minister William Barber, the progressive activist and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, with thorough reporting and sensitivity, letting facts speak for themselves but humanizing the subject as no fact alone can do. I’ve been part of the Poor People’s Campaign at the ground level and was heartened to learn here that more than one respected source calls Barber “the real thing.” But, whether or not Barber is your political comrade, you will learn that he believes himself to be your spiritual brother — a refreshing fusion of political and moral force on the sometimes god-averse left.


Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Feature writer for The New York Times.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

This was a really good year for profiles, despite their death (reported annually). So good that it was very hard to narrow it down, and so I was very grateful that I couldn’t pick any from the New York Times, where I work, which really helped narrow it down. (Though you’ve just got to read this one.)

And how do you choose from the others: Dan Riley on Timothée Chalamet (though exactly which profile/article/photo/table of contents, even, under Jim Nelson wasn’t great?). Allison P. Davis’ Lena Dunham lede-ender of fallopian tubes like outstretched arms? Amanda Fortini opening Michelle Williams’ historically very locked vault. Emily Nussbaum on Ryan Murphy. Paige Williams on Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Wright Thompson on Geno Auriemma. Jessica Pressler on Anna Delvey. (Jessica Pressler on anything.) What a year.

But I finally picked one, and when I did, I realized it was a no-brainer. Lyz Lenz, who has terrifying amounts of talent, pulled off the neatest trick: A profile of screamy Tucker Carlson that walks the line of being way too self-referential, and yet somehow makes that work. It’s perhaps because it’s so funny. It’s perhaps because instead of looking for some fatuous lede scene it goes straight to the most prominent aspect of Carlson (why is he always screaming?). It’s perhaps because she knows that there is no end to the delight of knowing his full name: Tucker McNear Swanson Carlson. Or maybe it’s this section ender: “His publicist calls after our interview to make sure I know that Carlson is not a racist.” Whatever it is, I was very grateful for it.


James Ross Gardner
Editor-in-chief, Seattle Met.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram (Paige Williams, The New Yorker)

I lost count of how many times Paige Williams was obliged to deploy terms like “inaccurately,” “falsely,” “erroneous,” and “lie” in this extraordinary portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. What’s remarkable about Trump’s press secretary though is that, at least here, those words are rarely used to describe statements by Sanders herself — but rather of those whose lies she must justify. It’s also what makes Sanders a cipher of our time. How does someone who vehemently claims to possess high moral character rationalize defending the indefensible? Put another way: How does one become that person? Williams’s search for an answer takes her to her subject’s native Arkansas, where in the ’90s the daughter of then governor Mike Huckabee “was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom” in the governor’s mansion, and Little Rock “residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes.” Later, during a visit with a lifelong friend, we catch a rare glimpse of the press secretary uncoiled and away from the podium, “wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls.” Details like these are certainly humanizing. But Williams isn’t here to vindicate Sanders’s transgressions. In 9,293 words she deftly dismantles the notion that the president’s “battering ram” might walk away from any of this with clean hands. “A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution,” Williams offers early in the piece. “But Sanders stayed.”


Seyward Darby
Editor in Chief, The Atavist.

The mystery of Tucker Carlson (Lyz Lenz, Columbia Journalism Review)

Lyz Lenz’s profile of Tucker Carlson in the Columbia Journalism Review begins and ends with the subject shouting at the writer, but insisting that he’s not. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Carlson’s raison d’être in the Trump era: convincing people to believe lies despite proof of the truth sitting right friggin’ there in the form of scientific studies, sociological data, photographic evidence, and the like. And when gaslighting fails? To Lenz, hardy soul that she is, Carlson again demonstrates his favorite ripostes. He deflects probing questions with glib mockery, by rejecting a query’s value so that he doesn’t have to address it, or — my personal favorite — with pseudo-intellectual incoherence masquerading as the sort of wily argument that wins high-school debaters gleaming trophies. (This is a digression where I beg someone reading this list to pen the definitive essay on how debate is the root of political evil. I will tweet it every day, forever.) Lenz, wholly in control of her craft, injects the profile with her own anxiety and anger about Carlson’s bullshit and with sly reminders that, for too long, respectable media overlooked his bullshit because Carlson was quite good at mimicking Hunter S. Thompson. People keep wondering, wide-eyed, what happened to Tucker Carlson. They don’t want to admit that the answer is, and was always, right friggin’ there.


Krista Stevens
Senior editor, Longreads.

Jerry and Marge Go Large (Jason Fagone, Huffington Post Highline)

To Gerald “Jerry” Selbee, an “intellectually restless” dyslexic cereal box designer from Battle Creek Michigan, everything in the world was a puzzle to be solved. At age 64, Selbee’s mathematical mind discovered a loophole in the Michigan Lottery’s “Winfall” game. He figured he’d test his lottery strategy as something fun to do to in retirement. Jason Fagone wrote 11,000 words about how Jerry and Marge Selbee won $27 million gaming the Michigan Lottery over nine years and this piece has it all in a winning combination. As you root for the working man who finds a way to win against a big government entity, you too savor the thrill of solving a tough puzzle to make your lottery dream come true. This is longform at its finest.

* * *

Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

The World of Nora Ephron: A Reading List

Nora Ephron (Photo by Munawar Hosain/Fotos International/Getty Images)

Every Thursday, I wake up and perform the same routine: I drive to downtown Durham, NC, park and walk to the bakery for a coffee, then cross the street and unlock the bookstore I work at. I crank Dusty Springfield up, sweep the mats, straighten the display cases, and flip the open sign around. Occasionally, someone will wander up and try to come in, five minutes before open, at which point I can offer one of those tiny retail mercies — outsized, and ultimately more rewarding for me then them — and say, it’s fine, really, go ahead and come on in.

It’s a nice sequence, though it’s not lost on me that while doing my job I’m also reenacting a scene, one I’ve secretly carried close since high school. Few movies made it into my parents’ strict North Carolina household, but You’ve Got Mail did, somehow, and the opening reel played on loop in my head for years: Meg Ryan skipping down the steps, buying her coffee, rolling up the gate to her bookstore. It’s autumn in New York; the trees blaze with color and the Cranberries are playing. The scene was adhesive not just because it was a prelude to romance, but because it was a vision of adult life was that funny and smart and paid attention.

Ephron cherished the use of routine in her movies, in much the same way that she cherished the use of references — movies, books, songs — to make us feel as if we’re pulled into a greater narrative, one at once familiar and inevitable. Years after first watching the movie, I’d walk through Washington Square Park, smack dab in the middle of a thrilling autumn, as my friend SJ delivered an impassioned monologue about how messed up it was for Joe Fox to actively deceive Kathleen Kelly through an online avatar. (Now we have a set of unflattering romantic shorthands — catfishing, ghosting, benching — not yet available to Ephron in the ’90s.) In theory, I probably agreed with SJ, but I was new to the city and new to dating and not yet entirely deformed by cynicism. Mostly, I was distracted by how much the argument itself seemed pulled from an Ephron film: two friends (Ephron loved, and lingered, on the banter between friends) walking through a park, tugging their coats closed and arguing about love and narrative and the movies.

Somehow, You’ve Got Mail turns 20 this year. The landscape of romance and the social mores and New York has all changed (Amazon now representing a much less charming evil than 1998’s Fox Books), and my own relationship with her writing has changed, too. I’m less sure than I was, 10 years ago, about what she was trying to say. Still — I think the language she offered up for love and revision is as relevant as ever, and as happily easy to rip off. “Everything is copy,” Nora Ephron liked to say in reference to her omnivorous approach to art. Increasingly, I feel it’s just as true to say of the people who watch her movies and feel the tug of longing, of wit, and of attention.

1. “Nora Ephron’s Potato-Chip Legacy” (Matt Weinstock, June 28, 2012, The Paris Review)

In Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” last year, the most important — or at least, most quoted, most tweeted — line comes when the titular heroine is called into the office at her Catholic school. They’re discussing college options. It’s clear, the nun tells her, that she loves Sacramento. “I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird says, at which point the nun looks at her intently. “Don’t you think that’s the same thing? Love and attention?”

Matt Weinstock makes a similar point about Ephron’s working definition of love, as found in a typical Ephron film — that anecdotal evidence of love can be found in the things you notice about another person, as when Harry delivers a monologue on New Years Eve, in When Harry Met Sally, about the amount of time that it takes Sally to order a sandwich, or when Sam describes his ex-wife in Sleepless in Seattle. Succinctly: “She could peel an apple in one long, curly strip. The whole apple.”

The beautiful thing about Weinstock’s piece is how closely it examines her flaws. It’s not mean-spirited, but it does take careful account of the inconsistencies of Ephron’s body of work, and the ways that she seemed to edit out her neuroses, or at least, outsource them to her characters. No matter. It’s a love letter, deeply felt, that doesn’t just pay attention to the quippy highlights of her legacy. The list of Sally’s idiosyncrasies that Harry rattles off, after all, aren’t all things that he necessarily likes about her. They’re his way of saying he’s paying attention.

2. “An Oral History of You’ve Got Mail,” (Erin Carlson, February 13, 2015, Vanity Fair)

Crisp white blouses, crab cake lunches on set, her aversion to the color blue — Delia Ephron, Meg Ryan, Hallee Hirsh (the actress that played Annabelle Fox — F-O-X!), and assorted cinematographers and producers from “You’ve Got Mail” gather to discuss Ephron’s relationship with her set, which of course also comes out to a conversation about her relationship with New York City.

John Lindley (cinematographer): [Nora] grew up in Los Angeles, right, but she had a love and a loyalty to New York that exceeded any native New Yorker that I ever met. She lived on the Upper West Side when we made that movie, and it was a little love story to the Upper West Side. And one of the things that I remember her saying is that many people think of New York as this monolithic, intimidating place. But when you live there, you realize that what it is: a bunch of little villages. And her little village was the Upper West Side.

3. “Nora Ephron’s Final Act,” (Jacob Bernstein, March 6, 2013, New York Times Magazine)

Ephron didn’t tell a lot of people that she was dying from Leukemia—an act of privacy that confounded her admirers, who’d grown accustomed to tracking her life, both onscreen and on paper. Wouldn’t a woman so intent on using her life for material (divorce, heartbreak, insecurities, messy purposes, dreams) want to write about her final act? Jacob Bernstein, Ephron’s son, wrestled with this idea enough to write a beautifully intensive piece on the last days of her death — and then, following in his mother’s footsteps, to turn it into art (“Everything is Copy,” his documentary, is available on HBO).

All her life, she subscribed to the belief that “everything is copy,” a phrase her mother, Phoebe, used to say. In fact, when Phoebe was on her deathbed, she told my mother, “Take notes.” She did. What both of them believed was that writing has the power to turn the bad things that happen to you into art (although “art” was a word she hated). “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh,” she wrote in her anthology “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “So you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

4. “On the Front Lines With Nora Ephron” (Lawrence Frascella, July 8, 2013, Rolling Stone)

What kind of generation did Ephron think she was writing to? Her movies were often cultural close studies, taking her essayistic impulse to diagnose and putting it to screen. In 1993, on the cusp of stardom — before Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail — she debriefed with Rolling Stone’s (patently misogynistic) Lawrence Frascella about the state love in the 90’s.

The younger persons that I know, especially the ones in California, I don’t even think they have sex. They have business dinners and business breakfasts, sometimes two business breakfasts. But I believe very strongly that underneath all of that is just a bunch of romantic stuff. Everybody’s got it. That’s one of the reasons Tom Hanks’s character moves to the Northwest. He goes from Chicago, which is your modern, work-driven urban environment, to Seattle, which is – let me tell you, after three days there with my husband, Nick says, “This is a city where people have chosen lifestyle over work.” And he’s right. There are cities like this all over America, full of people who are kayaking and living the good life.

5. “You’ve Got Mail” (Casper Ter Kuil, February 20, 2018, On Being)

Like me, fanboy Casper Ter Kuile grew up loving “You’ve Got Mail,” and he freeze-frames that experience — of growing up in the age of AOL, and watching too natural-born enemies bumble blindly toward each other on a chat room — beautifully, here. In the late 90’s, it hadn’t become quite creepy to chat with strangers on the Internet—novelty still had its grip — but it also hadn’t become normal to the point of banality, either. There was plenty of room for projection.

MR. TER KUILE: Right. She doesn’t even know, really, who he is. And she says, at some point, “I just wanted to write this down. So good night, dear void. Even if it’s just going into the void, good night, dear void.” And I remember, like, I wrote that in my diary to myself. [laughs] I really thought I was that kind of person.

MS. PERCY: Oh, my God.

MR. TER KUILE: Just, like — yeah, just, like, you have so many feelings, and where is it all going? And I think that’s what I love about this movie, is, yes, it’s a love story, but they don’t meet until the very last scene of the movie. The story is really about an idea of someone. And I met my husband online, so there’s an echo in my own life here. But there is a — the story and the love that builds inside both of these characters is one of longing, and of really projection onto the unknown of what might be. And I’m someone who always lives kind of in the future. I love to think about future plans. And I think this movie is so much about that — that it’s — you get to create perfection in your mind before it even happens.

6. “An Interview with Nora Ephron,” (Kathryn Borel, March 1, 2012, The Believer)

Enough attention is directed at the aesthetics of mid-90’s romantic comedies, that it’s easy to forget that Ephron led a prodigious career as a journalist, for over a decade, before co-writing her first script with her first husband, Carl Bernstein, in the mid-70’s (she began her career as a mail girl at Newsweek, and went on to be promoted and, eventually, sue Newsweek in the class action lawsuit that was serialized in Amazon’s lamentably short-lived show, “Good Girls Revolt.”) Her 2006 interview in The Believer, though, devotes some nice attention to her years at the Post and Esquire, and the making of Ephron as a writer.

That moment, for me, was not Heartburn. It was a piece I wrote in Esquire called “A Few Words about Breasts.” I knew when I finished writing that piece that either it was going to be a huge success or be judged as a kind of “Who needs to know any of this?” kind of thing. One or the other was going to happen, but I absolutely knew that both were possible. By the time I did Heartburn, I was around forty. I had a very clear memory of being at my typewriter in Bridgehampton, where Carl [Bernstein] and I had had a house—that was now in the divorce—but we were still using it at alternate times. I was supposed to be writing a screenplay. And when I started writing, sixteen pages of that novel came out in two days. I thought, Oh, I’ve found it. The whole time the marriage was breaking up and I was in a state of complete torment and misery, I knew that this would someday be a funny story. I absolutely knew it. It was too horrible. It was too ridiculous not to be.

7. “Nora Knows What To Do,” (Ariel Levy, July 6, 2008, (The New Yorker)

This is one of the New Yorker’s best-paired profiles, with Ariel Levy a charming, adaptable match for Ephron’s rapid-fire banter. She also manages to pull a difficult trick, which is that her profile is an entirely reverent one which also finishes, in the last three paragraphs, with a modest pan of Julie & Julia. And yet, the register of the piece — staged thematically over award dinners and lunches across New York (if it has any flaws, it’s probably that too much time is probably devoted to Ephron’s tidy eating habits) — is still adoring, and probably gives us as much insight into the prismic mind of the icon as we’ll get.

Ephron detests whining: you can acknowledge a problem, but only in the service of solving it. “Nobody really has an easy time getting a movie made,” she said. “And furthermore I can’t stand people complaining. So it’s not a conversation that interests me, do you know? Those endless women-in-film panels. It’s, like, just do it! Just do it. Write something else if this one didn’t get made.

***

Sarah Edwards s a freelance writer whose work has been published in The Village Voice, NewYorker.com, and The Baffler, among others.

Longreads Best of 2018: Sports Writing

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

Mirin Fader
Writer-at-large for Bleacher Report’s B/R Mag.

Most Dominating Athlete of 2018: Simone Biles (Danyel Smith, ESPN the Magazine)

Danyel Smith’s ESPN the Magazine cover story of Simone Biles was one of the most impactful pieces of sports writing I read this year. After I finished it, I felt like I knew Biles. Smith got Biles to open up, to even admit the fear she feels while competing on bars (what Olympic gold-medal winning athlete readily admits fear?), which is a kudos to Smith’s skills as a reporter. Although I don’t know Smith personally, I felt like I could hear her voice throughout the piece. She seamlessly interwove history and culture and context and sport to put together one of the most versatile sports profiles I’ve ever read. My favorite paragraph really sums up Smith’s brilliance as a journalist, and Biles’ genius as a gymnast: “But no matter how sparkly her leotard, she’s a killer as stone cold as David Ortiz or Robert Horry ever was. She creates each time she competes. Plus, Biles will run the score up on you with a red cheer bow on a ponytail pulled higher than J-Lo’s.”


Louisa Thomas
Contributor for The New Yorker.

Juan Martín del Potro Strikes Back (Chloe Cooper Jones, GQ)

Juan Martín del Potro is one of tennis’s most popular — and inspiring and tragic — figures. Del Potro won the U.S. Open in 2009, beating Roger Federer, and then his wrists began to fray. Cooper Jones tells the story of his long journey back. This is a beautifully written profile, an insightful portrait of the player on the court and the person off it — but it is also, most movingly, a meditation on pain.

Drew Brees is Hiding in Plain Sight (Greg Bishop, Sports Illustrated)

Bishop tackles the age-old question of what makes greatness — or even the greatest — and why it can be so easy to overlook. Take Drew Brees, the subject of this piece. At the same time, without being didactic, Bishop reminds us of something else: as seriously as we take all the records, sports are fun. And so is this story.

Everyone Believed Larry Nassar (Kerry Howley, The Cut)

A thoroughly reported, devastating reconstruction of what might be the most important sports story in recent history: how Larry Nassar sexually abused hundreds of young women and not only got away with it, but thrived in the gymnastics community.

Joel Anderson
Senior writer for ESPN the Magazine.

The Search for Jackie Wallace (Ted Jackson, The Times-Picayune)

On the Friday before the Super Bowl, The Times-Picayune dropped this tremendous profile of former NFL player and New Orleans native Jackie Wallace and his heartrending — and apparently ongoing — struggle with homelessness and drug abuse. The story got its start in 1990, when photographer Ted Jackson came across Wallace living in a camp underneath Interstate 10. Jackson photographed him for a story that ran that year, which seemed to lead to Wallace being rescued from the streets and addiction. But this is where the story begins, as Jackson loses touch with Wallace over the years and details his search for him over the next couple of decades. There’s so much to love here, starting with the care Jackson and the Times-Picayune put into showing how drugs can unravel a life and into asserting the fundamental humanity of Wallace. Jackson also subtly shows there’s more to his relationship with Wallace — a reminder that reporting doesn’t have to be merely transactional — and much more to Wallace than his troubles. It’s surprising in all sorts of ways, but especially in how humanizing it is of Wallace.

Everyone Believed Larry Nassar (Kerry Howley, The Cut)

In excruciating detail, Kerry Howley showed here how Larry Nassar — the unassuming and relentlessly charming USA Gymnastics national team doctor — wormed his way into the homes and hearts of hundreds of young female gymnasts and their families en route to becoming one of the most notorious child sex abusers in modern history. It’d be irresponsible not to credit the herculean investigative efforts of the Indianapolis Star in breaking the case against Nassar and USA Gymnastics — and the many other reporters and media outlets who tracked the developments through Nassar’s sentencing in federal and state court — but Howley’s exhaustive story illuminates exactly how and why Nassar was able to escape detection for so long. It wasn’t because his victims were silent. Far from it, in fact. It wasn’t because Nassar was particularly discreet. No, Howley writes, it was because Nassar “was good at this.” Two scenes from Howley’s story show this best. The first is told from the vantage point of a 9-year-old girl, who was digitally penetrated by Nassar with her mother sitting only a few feet away in his living room in 1990. The second comes near the end of the story, when one of his victims manages to make him cry during his sentencing hearing and she feels briefly triumphant. I won’t spoil the final line for you but it’s an unforgettable close that couldn’t have been more perfect, or haunting.


Natalie Weiner
Staff writer for SB Nation.

The Children of Central City (Jonathan Bullington and Richard A. Webster, The Times-Picayune)

They Are the Champions (Katie Barnes, ESPN the Magazine)

Both of these stories are extraordinary examples of my favorite kind of sportswriting — the kind that uses sports’ near-universal appeal and reach to illuminate social and political issues. “The Children of Central City” uses the lens of one youth football team in New Orleans to examine violence in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods; as its former coach explains early in the multi-part series, he’s had 28 former players be shot and killed over a 14 year span. The football team is a jumping off point through which the authors (and director — there’s a corresponding documentary) can explore how the trauma that comes from growing up surrounded by violence impacts kids’ lives, and how football is an escape, if an imperfect one. It’s a thoughtful, empathetic take on a story that’s too often left unexamined because it’s wrongly perceived as inevitable.

In “They Are the Champions,” two very different kids growing up in very different parts of the country share one thing: they are transgender. Their stories are pressing  not only because LGBTQ perspectives are grossly underrepresented in media as a whole, but also because they show that sports is the battleground where the very core of how we understand gender will be determined — a statement that sounds like hyperbole, but when you’re in the middle of Barnes’ story parsing the various ways people rationalize dividing sports by gender, quickly becomes self-evident. Mack Beggs and Andraya Yearwood just want to compete, and the world is going to have to catch up.


Matt Giles
Editor and head of fact-checking, Longreads.

Alone at Sea (Elizabeth Weil, New York Times Magazine)

Aleksander Doba has kayaked the Atlantic Ocean three times, and each crossing has been more dangerous than the last. Weil’s profile of the Polish native is an engrossing read of his trans-Atlantic trips, and why the 71 year old continues to push his body and psyche to such extreme limits. As he explains his reasoning to Weil, “I do not want to be a little gray man.”

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2018 year-end collection.

The Portrait of the Artist as a Criminal

This combination of June 2017 file booking photo shows Max Harris, left, and Derick Almena, at Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, Calif. (Alameda County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)

A charismatic yet abusive and manipulative guru, derelict building owners who allowed habitation in a warehouse with wiring described as “grossly unsafe,” and an underfunded, mismanaged fire department all contributed to a fire at Satya Yuga, also known as the Ghost Ship, an art collective that was the scene of “the most deadly structure fire in the United States since 100 people died in the Station nightclub in Rhode Island in 2003.” But who’s taking the blame? Who’s incarcerated? Not the building owners. Not the fire chief. Not the electric company. Not the city of Oakland, California. Rather, as Elizabeth Weil reports at the The New York Times Magazine, it’s Derick Almena the charismatic guru, and also, inexplicably the second man taking the rap is a kind yet hapless vegan artist named Max Harris who first discovered the fire and attempted to put it out before it got out of control.

Yet life can be cruel, and even a person striving toward right thought can set off cascades of events that go incomprehensibly awry.

Satya Yuga had its own logic. You had to tolerate people playing music at all hours of the night. You had to not use your toaster and your teakettle at the same time because the electricity was channeled from Custom O’s auto shop to the warehouse and then dispersed through a complex river system of wiring and extension cords. You had to work on your own art, collaborate with the other members of the collective and also help build the living, breathing art installation that was the warehouse itself. The mock contract people signed upon joining the collective had only one condition: “Be Unconditionally Awesome.”

Around 11:20 p.m., Harris decided to leave his post at the door to go inside Ghost Ship to use the bathroom. As he entered the building, he noticed the light looked strange — a glow on the ceiling. He ran to his studio and grabbed a fire extinguisher. But by the time he returned, eight or 10 seconds later, the fire was out of control. At 11:23 p.m., Carmen Brito, the potter and substitute teacher, who lived in the back of the warehouse, woke up in a room filled with smoke and called 911. Upstairs, as fire rose through the baseboards, people started shrieking, pleading, streaming down the strange staircase.

As details began to emerge, the fire was not understood as an isolated, idiosyncratic catastrophe. It was understood as the product of civic and societal failings. In the years leading up to the fire, the Oakland Fire Department had been chronically underfunded, understaffed and mismanaged. Between 2011 and 2015, the department employed neither a fire marshal nor an assistant fire marshal — and it is the fire marshal’s job to ensure that property owners and tenants follow the city’s building code. To deal with the fallout after the tragedy, the fire chief retired.

They found the prosecution’s idea that Harris held what the district attorney described as “a leadership position in the warehouse” manipulative, infuriating and absurd.

There was no way for Harris to process the situation, no way to assimilate the facts. He always thought that if he moved gently through the world, the world would move gently over him. He thought that if he helped others, good karma or Jesus or both would take care of him. Had he not done enough? Every time he entered the courtroom, he felt the vast weight of the community’s grief and accusation. “It’s just wrong,” he said of the whole situation into the jailhouse phone. He lost friends in the fire. He had his own trauma to work through. How had his life taken him here, with all these bodies laid at his feet?

Read the story

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A memorial to honor the dozens of people who died in the 2016 'Ghost Ship' warehouse fire. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Weil, Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, Sean Patrick Cooper, and Priya Krishna.

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