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Twinless in Twinsburg

Illustration by Laura McCabe

Anya Groner | Longreads | June 2017 | 20 minutes (5,065 words)

I’m stopped at a red light in Twinsburg, Ohio, when I spot my first pair riding in the Jeep behind me. Matching blond hair, bug-eye sunglasses, and pink chins fill the rearview mirror of my rental car. I glance and glance again before texting my sister. “It’s begun,” I type. “They’re here and you’re not.” I erase the last three words and press send. No point in guilting her for a decision she can’t reverse.

When the light turns green, I press the gas, heading to the local high school where a wiener picnic and silent auction will kick-off the 41st annual Twins Days festival. An identical twin myself, I’ll be eating my hot dog alone tonight. My sister, a marine biologist, has opted not to join me, instead signing up for a dive certification class the same weekend. Though she apologized for the timing, she didn’t offer to reschedule. Twins Days doesn’t interest her much.

I’m not sure what to expect or even why I’ve decided to come. The website tells me the three-day fete is patriotic and sweet, a massive show-and-tell where the attendees are also the main attraction. Last year, 2,053 sets of twins, triplets, and quads journeyed here from as far away as South Korea and Australia. The revelry includes competitive cornhole, look-alike and un-lookalike contests, talent shows, and a research plaza where scientists collect data from volunteers. My surface excuse for flying out is that I’m a writer, trying my hand at journalism, but even a rookie like me knows the event is far too personal for objectivity. I’ve known about the fest for as long as I can remember, and for most of those years I wouldn’t even consider attending. Lying on stacked bunks in our childhood bedroom well before our age reached double digits, my sister and I put Twins Days somewhere on the continuum between obnoxious and offensive, a gathering of voyeurs looking to celebrate sameness, the facet of our identity that frustrated us most. The best parts of twinhood we knew to be exclusive, shaped by our two unique personalities, shareable only with each other. For us, the festival held no appeal.

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Who Is Christopher Wray, Trump’s Nominee for FBI Director?

Then Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray speaking at a press conference at the Justice Department, 2005. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)

True to form, President Donald Trump announced his nominee for the new FBI director via Twitter Wednesday morning. If his pick — Christopher Wray, an alumnus of the Justice Department under George W. Bush who currently works at D.C.-based law firm King & Spalding — is confirmed by the Senate judiciary committee, he will enter into a politically fraught scene in which two of his former colleagues are major players.

So who, exactly, is Christopher Wray?

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For Ordinary Syrians, Is Backing Assad the Only Option?

A man waves to a member of the Syrian pro-government forces patrolling a street in the newly retaken Bab al-Hadid neighbourhood in Aleppo's Old City on December 8, 2016. (GEORGE OURFALIAN / AFP / Getty Images)

At The New York Times Magazine, Robert F. Worth reports from Aleppo, a city in ruins. Speaking with residents about the current state of existence, Worth also examines the social and political seeds of the Syrian War, now in its sixth year. The war has been supported by a cast of foreign sponsors on both sides. Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah have backed the Assad regime, which dropped bombs and chemical weapons on its own citizens, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey have aided the rebels attempting to overthrow Assad. With Aleppo firmly back into the hands of the Assad regime, Syrians and exiled expats are starting to wonder whether backing Assad is their best chance at ending the war so they can begin to rebuild their lives.

I wanted to wind back the clock and make sense of how a city that seemed so averse to politics — of any kind — had been torn apart.

Even Syrians have trouble answering that question. In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors.

All the same, Aleppo was a turning point, and in some ways an emblem of the wider war. Its fall appears to have persuaded many ordinary Syrians that the regime, for all its appalling cruelty and corruption, is their best shot at something close to normality.

All this may sound awfully precarious for Assad. But in a sense, it is just a more extreme form of the game Assad and his father have played for decades. The Assad regime arose after an unstable period during the 1950s and ’60s, when Syria was shaken by coups and countercoups. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, triumphed in part by managing a constellation of rivals who hated one another but were all dependent on him. They knew that without him at the center, chaos would return, and that would be bad for business. This is truer than ever today. And it has a secondary effect, not unimportant: Many ordinary people now see Assad as their only hedge against a far more toxic kind of chaos.

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How Did HGTV ‘Stars’ Become Celebrities?

Chip and Joanna Gaines (Photo by Mireya Acierto/FilmMagic)

Home and Garden Television, better known as HGTV, has forged a reputation as a television ratings giant in the past couple of years, more than two decades after the channel launched in 1994. Late last year, Kate Wagner noted the timeliness of the channel’s launch, given its niche — real estate as reality television programming: it surfaced amid the Clinton administration’s push for “huge mortgage reforms in order to stimulate growth in the home-building sector and provide more housing for lower-income Americans.” As home sales spiked, HGTV offered a glimpse into “the national home-buying and home-selling fervor,” Wagner wrote.

And interest in the channel’s offerings has not waned. Last year, an academic design journal devoted an entire issue to “Learning from HGTV.” An academic paper in American Quarterly in 2012 noted that HGTV briefly “became the object of public scorn” in the wake of the collapse of the housing market, as Americans found the programming “complicit” for its tendency to depict homes as “investments.” But it survived, and even thrived, as the players in its shows land celebrity magazine cover after cover.

Brooks Barnes, in his monthly “Scene Stealers” column for the New York Times Style section this weekend, noted that Tarek and Christina El Moussa, the couple in one of its hit shows, Flip or Flop, were featured on the cover of In Touch Weekly at least 14 times, with more than 90 articles on them.

“Puzzled, I asked a few Hollywood publicists if they could explain why the celebrity news media cared so much about the El Moussas. The head of publicity for one big studio responded, ‘Is that a fragrance?’” Barnes wrote.

Barnes sees the El Moussas as “fascinating — not as newsmakers, but as a window into the evolving celebrity news business.” A former US Weekly and Hollywood Reporter editor tells him the evolution is due to “the effects of a culturally divided America.”

Barnes explains President Donald Trump is divisive; tabloid magazines catch heat for putting him or his relations on their covers. The Kardashians’ ratings “have plummeted,” and “most movie stars have little tabloid tread left on them,” he adds, noting that Jennifer Aniston is still not pregnant. Plus, there’s the hunger for clicks in our age of digital news: “If there is no news, just glom onto something tiny. In Touch recently did an entire article about a basic Instagram post by Mr. El Moussa. (See it here!’),” Barnes wrote.

Over on The Ringer, Amanda Dobbins wrote late last year, in a piece titled “The End of Celebrity As We Know It,” that more than three million people regularly watch Flip or Flop, “which is more than the number of people who saw Will Smith’s most recent movie or bought Lady Gaga’s album.” She interviewed Lindsey Weber of the podcast Who Weekly, which regular discusses HGTV stars: “Anyone can do anything on the internet now. So now we have all these people that just exist because we have a democratic platform where anyone can do something that makes them notable,” Weber told her. Dobbins concluded, “If you are looking for a career change right now, you could do worse than midlevel celebrity; the market has never been more open.”

But is the rise of HGTV celebrities a window into, or a reprieve from, a “culturally divided America”? Read more…

White Men

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

Namwali Serpell | Topic | June 2017 | 5 minutes (1,300 words)

Our latest Exclusive is an essay by Namwali Serpell with illustrations by Lauren Tamaki. This story is co-funded by Longreads Members and published in collaboration with Topic, which publishes an original story, every other week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

White men, white men, white men. They’re everywhere these days. Young ones leering, old ones Lear-ing. A white man sent me a message on a dating app the other day—an initial parry, if you will, a hello—about his penis, my fully-clothed photo, and my presumed “submissiveness.” An older white male colleague once told me he didn’t understand the “ontological difference” I had experienced in being a brown woman. The same man sexually harassed me for three years. There are white men to kill left and right. It would be so much easier to hate them if I hadn’t loved one from birth.

My father is a white man. In my country Zambia, where he moved as a young Brit eager to conduct research, he’s called a muzungu. He met and married my black mother there in the sixties. They made brown me, and my two brown sisters. We moved to the States in 1989. Maybe it’s because my family was already mixed, or because we now lived in the American suburbs, but it never felt weird to me to date white guys. Read more…

The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, photo via State Archives of Florida

Cynthia R. Greenlee | Longreads | June 2017 | 2,900 words ( 12 minutes)

In 1962, teenager George F. Jackson wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy with an appeal: “I am a thirteen-year-old colored boy and I like to spell. Do you think you could help me and get the Lynchburg bee opened to all children?”

The long road to the National Spelling Bee has always begun with local contests, often sponsored by a local newspaper. Nine publications, organized by the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, banded together in 1925 to create the first National Bee in Washington, D.C.

Decades later, George Jackson was protesting the policies of the local newspaper that sponsored the Lynchburg, Virginia contest, which excluded black students from participating in the official local competition — the necessary step that might send a lucky, word-loving Lynchburg child to nationals. There was more at stake than a coveted all-expenses-paid trip to the capital, an expensive set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and a $1,000 cash prize. For local and national civil rights activists, keeping black children from the spoils of spelling fame was an extension of Jim Crow educational policies that should have ended, in theory, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

While the Warren Court decided in 1954 that “separate but equal” would no longer be the law of the land, there were still “Negro” schools and white schools educating children across the South less than a decade later. A patchwork of local responses met the desegregation orders that followed the Supreme Court ruling, including deliberate foot-dragging, some real confusion about how to undo what years of white supremacy had wrought in the nation’s schools, and full-throated defiance to educational equity.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Donald Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Rebecca Solnit, Robert F. Worth, Margaret Talbot, Porochista Khakpour, and Frank Bures.

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

West Virginia: Still High on Hope

Dr. John Aldis holds a naloxone nasal spray kit with the instruction sheet in Martinsburg, W.Va. Aldis trains people so that they can administer naloxone to an individual in the midst of a heroin overdose. (Jenni Vincent/The Journal via AP)

At The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot reports on the opioid epidemic in West Virginia. There, the overdose rate is the highest in the United States and many are fighting to help loved ones, friends, neighbors, and sometimes complete strangers get healthy: An emergency paramedic who routinely sees multiple overdoses a day, sometimes the same people on repeat. A team of moms called “The Hope Dealers” who drive addicts hours away to get the treatment they need. A 71-year-old doctor offering free public classes on how to administer Narcan, a drug that reverses the effects of these now-commonplace overdose. All this in an opioid epidemic fueled by cheap highs and small-town despair over limited prospects.

We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. Inside a nicely kept house in a modern subdivision, the man was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, taking intermittent gasps. He was pale, though not yet the blue-tinged gray that people turn when they’ve been breathing poorly for a while. Opioid overdoses usually kill people by inhibiting respiration: breathing slows and starts to sound labored, then stops altogether.

As we drove away, Barrett predicted that the man would check himself out of the hospital as soon as he could; most O.D. patients refused further treatment. Even a brush with death was rarely a turning point for an addict. “It’s kind of hard to feel good about it,” Barrett said of the intervention. “Though he did say, ‘Thanks for waking me up.’ Well, that’s our job. But do you feel like you’re really making a difference? Ninety-nine per cent of the time, no.” The next week, Barrett’s crew was called back to the same house repeatedly. The man overdosed three times; his girlfriend, once.

But a larger factor, it seems, was the despair of white people in struggling small towns. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate escape drugs.” She told me, “Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns, because it makes the world’s problems go away. Much more so than coke or meth, where you want to run around and do things—you get aggressive, razzed and jazzed.”

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El Padre de Los Migrantes

El Padre Javier, director del albergue en Juárez durante los últimos siete años, sentado en su oficina entre pilas de libros. Fotos de Itzel Aguilera.

Alice Driver | Longreads | Junio ​​2017 | 22 minutos (5,698 palabras)

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“¿Qué tan buena es una frontera si no hay gente dispuesta a abrirla de par en par?”
— Hanif Willis Abdurraqib *cita del relato en vivo en el “California Sunday Popup” en Austin, Texas, 4 de marzo de 2017

* * *

A la orilla de la tierra prometida se levantan tormentas de polvo provenientes del desierto obscureciéndolo todo, incluso los migrantes tienen que esperar frente a un complejo rodeado por una valla metálica coronada por alambre de púas. Pero el Padre Javier Calvillo Salazar es oriundo de Ciudad Juárez, México, y está acostumbrado a todo esto, así como a todos aquellos que llegan después de una jornada en la que bien pudieron haber transcurrido miles de kilómetros y cientos de días, casi todos llegan cubiertos de cicatrices, con huesos rotos o sin alguno de sus miembros, con heridas que dejan en evidencia la falta de humanidad que se encuentra a lo largo del camino. Son personas que llegan llorando, con rostros endurecidos, con embarazos, con enfermedades venéreas y hasta con historias que remiten a las de Gabriel García Márquez, en las que cuentan haber visto con sus propios ojos a un cocodrilo devorar a un recién nacido de una sola y tajante mordida.

Nicole fue entregada en los brazos de su madre, Ana Lizbeth Bonía de 28 años, en un hospital de la frontera norte de México. Después de una travesía de 9 meses, que inició en Comayagua, Honduras, Ana Lizbeth llegó al albergue de migrantes Casa del Migrante Diócesis de Juárez con su esposo Luis Orlando de 23 años, y su desnutrido hijo José Luis de 2 años, que tenía unos ojos redondos como platos que brillaban con emoción. Ana nunca terminó la primaria, y pasó su niñez en las calles, vendiendo verduras desde los 4 años.

El albergue para migrantes en Juárez está tan cerca de El Paso, Texas, que los migrantes sienten el agridulce llamado de una tierra que pueden ver pero en la que difícilmente pueden vivir de manera legal. El albergue cuenta con 120 camas para hombres, 60 para mujeres, 20 para familias, así como con un área aparte en donde los migrantes transgénero pueden quedarse si así lo desean. La mayoría de los migrantes que llegan son hombres solteros, y durante las entrevistas realizadas ellos mencionaron que la amenaza del presidente Trump de separar a los niños de sus madres ha provocado una caída en la migración de estos grupos. Inicialmente, cada migrante tiene permitida una estancia no mayor a tres días, pero pueden quedarse más tiempo dependiendo de su condición, como es el caso de Ana, que necesitaba tiempo para descansar y recuperarse después de haber dado a luz a Nicole. Read more…

Between Life and Death, There’s San Francisco: A Reading List

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

They came in the tens of thousands, pushing baby carriages and packing roller skates. All in all, an estimated 200,000 pedestrians crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on May 27, 1937, its first day in business. The bridge was already a San Francisco landmark—a flaming, burnt-orange beacon conceived a decade earlier by Leon Moisseiff, who had engineered the Manhattan Bridge. It was a graceful design, but suspension bridges still weren’t entirely safe—the engineer’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge would fail spectacularly only a few months after it opened in 1940.

The Golden Gate also has a dark side. To afford a view of the city, the bridge has a low barrier that is easy to scale. (In “Jumpers,” the New Yorker’s Tad Friend meditates on the bridge’s reputation for death—for the families and friends of those who succeed in their jumps, it’s an indelible monument to their loved ones’ pain.) This month, city workers will finally begin the installation of a new barrier, a grey netting that will blend into the water without obscuring the view. Officials hope it will finally reduce suicide rates on the deadly bridge.

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