Search Results for: New York Times

There Are Few Second Chances for Immigrants Who Commit Crimes

Photo by Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

At Guernica, Anjali Enjeti reports on the lives of immigrants who now live in fear of deportation after serving prison sentences for crimes they committed in their early lives. For US residents without legal citizenship, ICE leaves little opportunity for self-improvement. After their prison time, these immigrants have to regularly check in with ICE, who often detain them again, indefinitely, in facilities that resemble prisons, and essentially punish them for the same crime multiple times. This is the opposite of being born white in America, where white men repeated fail upwards.

Many of these residents fled trauma in their native countries only to endure trauma in America from racist taunts and violence, and now, the constant specter of detainment and deportation. This approach discounts everything good that these residents have done in their communities since their early crime. They work legal jobs, pay taxes, take care of their children and elderly family members and often volunteer at organizations that help other immigrants integrate into society. As The New York Times recently reported in “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant,” this link between crime and non-citizen immigrants is a figment of America’s racist imagination, and as the mounting evidence shows, the white men in the current White House commit more crimes than immigrants do.

Since he left prison, he’s been a community organizer for juvenile justice reform and immigration rights, and founded API-ROC, an organization that assists with re-entry and immigration services for formerly incarcerated Asian and Pacific Islanders in Orange County. “Tung is a monumental part of our community,” says Lan Nguyen, a fellow community organizer who has attended activist training sessions with him. “He donates so much of his time and emotional labor into helping others.” He is also the primary earner for his wife and stepson.

But despite Nguyen’s success assimilating back into society, he’s often worried. Though he continues to live at home with his family, in 2011 an immigration judge issued a final order of removal. “Take my criminal file and compare it to who I am today,” says Nguyen. “I’m asking for mercy.” He doesn’t know when or whether ICE will detain him, and lives in fear that ICE will target him soon. “I’m just so vulnerable right now.”

Read the story

Jonathan Franzen’s “Readers”

Jonathan Franzen
Novelist/essayist Jonathan Franzen. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New Yorker)

“Most of the people who have complaints with me aren’t reading me,” says Jonathan Franzen, but he’s a process guy. He doesn’t read anything by his readers. They could write the book on reading him, but he wouldn’t read it and neither would they.

In The New York Times MagazineTaffy Brodesser-Akner profiles Franzen profiling his haters, who he’s fine with:

People can think something about you that isn’t true, and it isn’t necessarily your job to correct them. And if you do correct them, the corrections will eat up your entire life, and then where is your life? What did you do? You don’t have to answer criticism of yourself. You don’t even have to listen to it. You don’t have to fit your thoughts into sound bites just because of character limitations.

Has anyone considered that the interaction is the fragility? Has anyone considered that letting other people define how you fill your day and what they fill your head with — a passive, postmodern stream of other people’s thoughts — is the fragility?

Right at that minute, I wanted what he had so badly that I would have drunk his blood right there in the arboretum to get it.

Here is another thing about birds: They don’t care about people. They don’t interact with them, and yet they are totally accurate seismographs for people’s behavior. They reflect us without coming anywhere near us.

Read the story

La Otra

Getty / Sire Records / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jaquira Díaz | Longreads | June 2018 | 19 minutes (4,721 words)

1985. These were the days of Menudo and “We Are the World,” the year boxer Macho Camacho gave a press conference in a leopard-skin loincloth as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” blared from radios across the United States. In one month, the space shuttle Challenger would explode while all of America watched on television, entire classrooms full of kids, everyone eager to witness the first teacher ever launched into space. My mother had just turned 22, and a week later Levy turned 8. By then, Mami had three children. She’d already been a mother for more than a third of her life.

In those days, Mami teased her blond hair like Madonna, traced her green eyes with blue eyeliner, applied several coats of black mascara, apple-red lipstick, and matching nail polish. She wore skin-tight jeans and always, no matter where she was going, high heels. She dusted her chest with talcum powder after a bath, lotioned her arms and legs, perfumed her body and her hair. My mother loved lotions, perfume, makeup, clothes, shoes. But really, these were just things to her. The truth was my mother loved and enjoyed her body. She walked around our apartment butt-ass naked. I was more used to seeing her naked body than my own. You should love your body, my mother taught me. A woman’s body was beautiful, no matter how big, how small, how old, how pregnant. This my mother firmly believed, and she would tell me over and over. As we got older, she would teach me and Alaina about masturbation, giving us detailed instructions about how to achieve orgasm. This, she said, was perfectly normal. Nothing to be ashamed of.

While my father only listened to salsa on vinyl, Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Ismael Rivera, my mother was all about Madonna. She was American, she liked to remind us, born in New York, and she loved everything American, including her music. She belted the lyrics to “Holiday” while shaving her legs in the shower, while making us egg salad sandwiches for lunch. She talked about moving us to Miami Beach, where most of our titis and Grandma Mercy lived, about making sure we learned English.
Read more…

Balancing the Books

Pamela Hansford Johnson, English novelist and critic, chatting to novelist Olivia Manning at a party given by the British PEN Club to celebrate the opening of the club's new headquarters in Chelsea. Original Publication: Picture Post - 4722 - People Who Write Your Books - pub. 1949 Original Publication: People Disc - HM0383 (Photo by Picture Post/Getty Images)

It’s going to take a lot of work to correct history so that it includes all the great women whose lives and work have been overlooked and obliterated by the patriarchy. But strides are being made! The New York Times is retroactively publishing obituaries of notable women and others who aren’t straight white men. And now The Paris Review, which had virtually erased one of its own women editors from its masthead, as A.N. Devers reported last December *, has launched something of a corrective: “Feminize Your Cannon,” a monthly series featuring “underrated and underread” female authors.

The first installment, by Emma Garman, profiles British Novelist Olivia Manning (1908-1980), known best for her novel School for Love and for her Balkan and Levant trilogies.

It took Manning until late in her career to achieve a level of real acclaim, perhaps because her stories drew on harsher aspects of real life and less likable women characters — aspects that might have been better appreciated if she were publishing now. Manning was so vocally dissatisfied with her career she was known as “Olivia Moaning.” A contemporary of Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis, she was outwardly jealous of their greater success and fame. She’d bristled at the idea that she’d be more successful posthumously, but that’s what came to pass.

Seven years after her death in 1980 at age seventy-two, the BBC aired Fortunes of War, a faithful seven-part adaptation of the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy. Starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh and featuring multiple international locations, the series had the highest budget in BBC history. Masterpiece Theatre’s broadcast of the show in the U.S. prompted the New York Times to call Manning “the only English woman novelist to have painted a broad, compassionate and witty canvas of men and women at war that invites comparison with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.”

Manning would have been gratified to finally hear it—and then disappointed anew. Today those who have read Manning’s novels (usually only the trilogies, as most of the others are out of print) tend to admire them. But her place in the pantheon of important twentieth-century British novelists, even of rediscovered women authors such as Elizabeth Taylor and Rosamond Lehmann, is marginal and precarious. The scholar and critic Rohan Maitzen, when writing about Manning, found “that her name was wholly unfamiliar to two of my academic colleagues who are specialists in early 20th-century literature.” None of Manning’s work is available on Kindle.

“Not all writers of genius take the public by storm,” she writes in her introduction to a 1968 edition of Northanger Abbey. “Jane Austen in her lifetime was successful without being a sensation.” The self-consolation is touchingly evident.

In the mean time, Devers soldiers on in her efforts to make sure women authors are given their due and more widely read. She’s just successfully crowdfunded a new business, The Second Shelf, which will offer “rare books, modern first editions, manuscripts, & rediscovered works by women,” plus a quarterly publication.

*The omission has since been corrected.

Read the story

Surviving Depression

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

In the wake of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain’s recent suicides, the New York Times published a piece with the headline, “What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed.” The writer, Heather Murphy, noticed that the people commenting on these stories were struggling with the same question: “What do you do when a friend is depressed for such a long time that you’ve started to feel that nothing you can do will make a difference, and your empathy reserves are tapped out?”

Here is a difficult truth: If your loved one has not yet come to terms with accepting help from a professional, there is very little you can do for their sickness.

But I phrased that carefully for a reason. There is very little you can do for their sickness. There is plenty you can do for them — without exhausting yourself. The Times story leads with one of the most effective options: “Don’t underestimate the power of showing up.”

Read more…

Ghost Writer: The Story of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Author

Original Parker Brothers Ouija Board elements from Dave Winer/Flickr CC, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Joy Lanzendorfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,948 words)

One day in 1913, a housewife named Pearl Curran sat down with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings at a Ouija board. Curran’s father had died the year before, and Hutchings was hoping to contact him. While they’d had some success with earlier sessions, Curran had grown tired of the game and had to be coaxed to play. This time, a message came over the board. It said: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come — Patience Worth my name.”

This moment was the start of a national phenomenon that would turn Curran into a celebrity. Patience Worth, the ghost who’d contacted them, said she was a Puritan who immigrated to America in the late 1600s. Through Curran, she would dictate an astounding 4 million words between 1913 and 1937, including six novels, two poetry collections, several plays, and volumes of witty repartee.

The work attracted national headlines, serious reviews, and a movie deal. Patience Worth’s poetry was published in the esteemed Braithwaite’s anthologies alongside writers like Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1918, she was named an outstanding author by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York. Her novel, The Sorry Tale, was a bestseller with four printings. The New York Times said her poetry was a “high level of literary quality” with “flashes of genius.” Harper’s Magazine said that the “writings attributed to Patience Worth are exceptional.” The New Republic added: “That she is sensitive, witty, keenly metaphorical in her poetry and finely graphic in her drama, no one can deny.”

Literary Digest summed up the critical interest by writing: “It is difficult not to take Patience Worth seriously.” Read more…

Behind The NYT Investigation into Prosecuting Overdoses as Homicides

Sonya Cradle holds a poem she wrote in memory of her friend Len Bias, during a wake for Bias at a church Sunday evening on June 22, 1986 in Washington. Bias died of an apparent heart attack in his University of Maryland dormitory. (AP photo/Tom Reed)

Last year, I spoke to a former cop and a public health policy expert, both of whom told me that the major failing of the “war on drugs” was prioritizing incarceration over treatment and prevention. Part of the problem today, the former cop told me, was that in many places where opioids are currently leading to deaths, the only resource available is law enforcement. He pointed to the Midwest town of East Liverpool, Ohio, where a photo of two adults overdosing in a car with a baby in the backseat had gone viral. The East Liverpool police chief had told NPR, “We don’t have any resources, and we don’t have a place. Even if somebody comes down here to the station, knocks on the door and asks for help, where do we send them? We have nothing here in our county.”

“Opioid crisis” has become a catchphrase in the United States. The word crisis points to the panic that authorities in government and law enforcement feel about the situation — panic that seems to be spurring a fevered response to the issue.

A recent New York Times investigation looked at the fervor that has seized prosecutors around the country attempting to do their part to address the problem — by bringing homicide charges against the friends, family, and fellow users of people who die by overdose.

“I look at it in a real micro way,” Pete Orput, the chief prosecutor in Washington County outside Minneapolis, told the reporter, Rosa Goldensohn. “You owe me for that dead kid.”

Goldensohn wrote:

As overdose deaths mount, prosecutors are increasingly treating them as homicide scenes and looking to hold someone criminally accountable. Using laws devised to go after drug dealers, they are charging friends, partners and siblings. The accused include young people who shared drugs at a party and a son who gave his mother heroin after her pain medication had been cut off. Many are fellow users, themselves struggling with addiction.

Goldensohn (who goes by Rosie) spent nearly a year exploring this issue, in several states around the country. Longreads spoke to her and her editor, Shaila Dewan, about the investigation and how it came together.

How did you come up with or find this story?

RG: In 2016, I heard New York City’s now-police commissioner, then the Chief of Department, James O’Neill, allude to opening overdose investigations on Staten Island during a City Council hearing. Then last year, I learned that the city was spending a lot of their opioid plan resources on detectives and amping up that approach. I set up a Google alert, “overdose charged murder.” I wasn’t necessarily thinking of doing a national story, but I was getting so many clips from all over that I set up a spreadsheet and started tracking them. I saw a lot of local articles saying, “This is the first such charge in this county,” that kind of thing, so I knew it was an emerging trend.

Shaila, What was your reaction when Rosie first brought this story to you? Did you have any hesitations? Did you immediately know what was needed, or was there more of a process in developing what it would ultimately be?

SD: Rosie’s story pitch was ​like Athena leaping from the head of Zeus full grown. I knew immediately that even though she had not written for us before, it was worth a full-fledged New York Times takeout. It was a staggering trend that had so many implications and said something important about how the country deals with crisis.

In terms of what was needed, what we talked about early on (and what I think Rosie achieved), was giving full voice to all sides of the issue — the accused, the victims’ families, the prosecutors, etc. We didn’t want it to be a gotcha piece; we wanted it to really grapple with responsibility and guilt.

What kind of resources and support did this story require?

RG: A lot. First off, a very experienced and fantastic editor and a supportive desk and institution. Shaila spent a ton of time with me, basically taught me how to do this kind of story while I was doing it. I had never done anything on this scale before and she had the map and knew where we were in the process even when I didn’t. We projected each section on a TV screen and worked through it line by line.

Second, time. Third, money. The Times invested a lot of money in this piece, flying me around to West Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin. Fourth, a brilliant data team that audited all my numbers and analysis to make sure I was doing it right. Fifth, the lack of desire for any extracurricular activities or social engagement.

SD: We needed time and travel. Time to do way more interviews than we would ever use, to become an expert on something that no one is an expert on yet because it’s too new, and travel to find and go deep with the right examples. Rosie actually went to Hibbing, MN, twice, but I’ll let her tell that story if she wants to.

We also needed to quantify the problem as best we could​. Data is a perennial problem in criminal justice stories because there are basically more than 3,000 local justice systems and many states don’t have reliable, centralized case tracking.

Rosie, can you talk about what you learned from this project, your biggest takeaways?

RG: One of my biggest takeaways is how much of the writing of a long feature like this is done in the reporting of it, getting the kind of details that will bring it to life. As Shaila mentioned, I went to Hibbing twice. I planned to go back secretly for a weekend night with frequent flyer miles because I was looking for a word to describe this town and I felt like I needed to see it again. I had a really nice breakfast at Sportsman’s Cafe and gabbed with the dishwasher there and tried to see the taconite mine but it was blocked off. Hibbing is not only the birthplace of Bob Dylan, but of the Greyhound bus, I learned. The word I came back with was “snowy.”

What were the biggest challenges in making this story happen?

SD: It was extraordinarily difficult to count cases because they were charged under various statutes and sometimes were impossible to separate from other homicide cases. The Times‘s data people and researchers were able to help Rosie clean up her database and determine what data was reliable enough to use. Also, in legal reporting, it’s just incredibly easy to misstep because there are so many finer points.

RG: The analysis of Pennsylvania cases had a lot of logistical pieces, because I needed to get court documents from all these counties and then speak to people involved in dozens of cases, many ongoing. But for me, the biggest challenge was wrangling this massive quantity of material. I interviewed, I think, 15 prosecutors and four are in the piece. I went to a whole trial that’s not in here. What to leave in, what to leave out, in the immortal words of Bob Seger.

Shaila, what advice do you have for reporters who want to undertake a story like this?

SD: Persistence is a good quality. ​I just think that good reporters are determined reporters.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Ilya S. Savenok / Getty Images for Dove

This week, we’re sharing stories from Amanda Mull, Allegra Hobbs, Andrew O’Hagan, Andrew Kay, and Joe Veix.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

‘I Love What Human Voices Do Together’: An Interview with Neko Case

AP Photo/Tony Avelar, Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Hermes | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (3,994 words)

 

Neko Case’s powerhouse voice often seems like it might level buildings. But during a 20-plus-year career, she’s put it to more constructive use, both as singular solo act and poster child for collective creativity. She formed the ultra-meta power-pop band The New Pornographers with kindred singer-songwriters Carl Newman and Dan Bejar in 1997, the same year she released her own debut LP, The Virginian, an eclectic, country-rock-leaning set of originals and deep-catalog covers: Everly Brothers, Loretta Lynn, hard-rock-era Queen. Since then she’s worked alternately with the Pornographers and under her own name, with occasional side projects like The Corn Sisters (with Carolyn Mark) and Case/Lang/Viers (a low-key supergroup with k.d. lang and Laura Viers).

Hell-On, Case’s new solo album, is as gorgeous, imaginative, and potent as any she’s made, and for a lyricist given to imagistic fables and emotional meditations, it responds to the cultural-environmental moment vividly. Songs address nature’s ruthlessness (it’s worth noting Case’s Vermont home was destroyed in a fire when she was out of the country recording songs), along with the vagaries and tyrannies of gender, the endless negotiations of love, and even the attributes of the Almighty. “God is not a contract or a guy,” she sings on the title track, a faintly hallucinatory waltz that tilts into an empowered come-on (“I am not a mess/I’m a wilderness, yes/The undiscovered continent/For you to undress/But you’ll not be my master/You’re barely my guest,” she instructs). Another standout, “Halls of Sarah,” casts a #metoo side-eye at the trope of woman-as-muse (“Our poets do an odious business loving womankind/As lions love Christians”). At the same time, “Sleep All Summer,” a song by ex-bandmate Eric Bachmann, is a heartbreaker about faded love that feels like a forgotten classic.

The recording sessions enlisted a busload of other fellow travelers: Viers and lang, punk/pop/queer/ feminist/fashion icon Beth Ditto, veteran grunge crooner Mark Lanegan, Swedish indie-pop scientist Bjorn Yttling, various Pornographers and other long-time associates, a squadron of whom are on the road with her this year. At a tour stop in Brooklyn in May, bandmates Rachel Flotard and Shelly Short formed a powerhouse frontline with Case at the club Littlefield, delivering new songs like a trio of wisecracking Valkyries.

I spoke to Case on the phone some days later, as she was idling in San Diego before another show. She spoke about the album, the fire that recently destroyed her house, and the 2016 WOMANPRODUCER conference, which she described as “the highlight of my professional career.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(You can listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast here:

Read more…

For Me, With Love and Squalor

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Lauren Markham | Longreads | June 2018 | 23 minutes (5,790 words)

One recent day, when it was raining and I was feeling particularly blue, I decided to visit my local bookstore. Though bookstores were once among my favorite places to spend time, ever since my own book was published eight months ago, trips into bookstores have mutated into sordid affairs. I’ll walk in the door, feign cool, casual, just your average browser, then drift over to the shelves in the way someone might sidle up to the bar with a good-looking mark in sight. I’m not really browsing, not just refilling my drink — I’m searching, quite shamefully, for my own book on the shelves.

When it’s there, with its beaming burnt-orange cover jammed somewhere near Norman Mailer, Stephane Mallarme, Katherine Mansfield, Javier Marías, I feel a blush of glee. But more often than not, it’s not on the shelves at all.

It turns out that just because you wrote a book doesn’t mean the bookstores will sell it. No matter what accolades my book has received, each visit to the bookstore feels a new test of my book’s worth — and my own.

That rainy day, I was sure that finding my book on the shelves would release me from my blueness. On the other hand, in the likely event that my book wasn’t there, I would have permission to sink lower, reclining into the indigo bleak. I stepped inside the store, delivering flecks of rain onto the floor. As I suspected — as I feared — my book was nowhere to be found. Read more…