Search Results for: Occupy-Wall-Street

The stories of Daniel Murphy and Ben Zucker, two participants in Occupy Wall Street who are still looking to define what the movement is all about: 

At 23, Zucker has the organizing gene. He’s a fresh graduate of Tulane University, where he studied public health to get a foot in the door of social justice work, and his family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, just inside the Beltway. He once spent a semester running a health program in Senegal, and upon his return, he got involved with a protest by dining services workers. Zucker, who was hooked after first swinging by McPherson in early October, represents the liberal side of the movement. He wants universal health care and federal takeovers of big banks, and he thinks Occupy Wall Street is a good way to make it all happen.

That’s a sharp contrast with Murphy, a Long Beach native who earned his high school diploma in 2004 but never graduated. At 17, he was sentenced to more than two years in the California Youth Authority for stabbing three people at a coffee shop after his friend was punched.

“The Occupiers: A Liberal and a Radical Struggle for the Soul of a Movement.” — Andrew Katz, The Atlantic

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Evan Kindley: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Evan Kindley is the managing editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Ariel Levy, “Basta Bunga Bunga” (June 6, 2011) – The New Yorker

A great piece about what proved to be the Last Days of Berlusconi’s Italy, with all the virtues of the typical artfully triangulated New Yorker profile (as recently codified by John McPhee) plus a refreshing willingness to let Levy herself play a crucial role.  (Difficult to avoid, perhaps, when the people you interview say things like “I see you are a girl—I want to kiss you! … This is nature.”)

Adam Plunkett, “King of the Ghosts” (October 7, 2011)  – n+1

Moving, passionate, yet determinedly unsentimental remembrance of David Foster Wallace by one of his students at Pomona that doubles as a review — the best I’ve seen — of his frustrating posthumous semi-opus The Pale King.  Whether or not you care a whit about Wallace, there’s a lot to be learned here about the anguish of mentorship: “He expressed some of the most meaningful things he said to me in some of his sentences most likely to seem meaningless. ‘It means a lot that it means a lot,’ ‘I feel for you.’”

Drake Bennett, “David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street” (October 26, 2011) – Bloomberg Businessweek

“David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.” I, too, have failed to learn to drive in 2011.

Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict” (November 18, 2011) – The New Inquiry

I’m not sure I buy Horning’s fundamental premise, that “Papa” John Phillips was “a harbinger of what microcelebrity may do to the rest of us,” but the two halves of this neatly turned essay — a knowledgeable account of Phillips’s sordid solo career and a lucid analysis of how an increasing amount of our (increasingly internet-dependent) sociality is getting redefined as “sharing” (“It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took”) — are each worth the price of admission.

Sy Montgomery, “Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus” (November/December 2011) – Orion Magazine

My nickname around the Los Angeles Review of Books office is “the Octopus.”  Read this and draw your own conclusions.

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Businessweek's Sheelah Kolhatkar: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sheelah Kolhatkar is features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek.

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Some of my favorite non-Businessweek features that were published this year:

“Lost at Sea,” Jon Ronson, The Guardian

This piece combines a genre I love—the gritty crime story—with the utter weirdness of the cruise ship industry. Apparently people disappear from cruise ships all the time, but you usually don’t hear about it because the cruise lines keep it quiet. Ronson goes deep into the bizarre cruise culture as he tries to figure out what happened to Rebecca Coriam, who vanished from the Disney Wonder last March.

“All The Angry People,” George Packer, The New Yorker

This story accomplished what seemed almost impossible, at least from an editor’s perspective: it made a compelling narrative out of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in lower Manhattan. Even though OWS was being covered to death, this story—along with Bloomberg Businessweek’s own fine contribution, Drake Bennett’s profile of David Graeber—found a new angle on it and made it fresh and compelling.

“The Girl from Trails End,” Kathy Dobie, GQ

This devastating story just really stayed with me.

“California and Bust,” Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

His piece about Iceland (“Wall Street on the Tundra”) is my favorite one he’s done about the global financial crisis, but Michael Lewis’s breakdown of the fiscal disaster that is California was his best in 2011. It really makes you think about the scary place we might be headed as a country, and the scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger is priceless.

“Lady, Where’s My Magazine**?” Ann Friedman

This is a parody, and it isn’t terribly long, so I’m not sure that it qualifies. But it is hilarious, and perfectly illustrates much of what is wrong with the publishing business.

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Bold said he had this sense early on in his involvement in OWS. And inspired by a presentation he’d seen at NYU about the collection of artifacts after the September 11th attacks, he decided to get serious about collecting immediately. He told people he knew in the movement to save their writings and signs. He began carrying stuff home himself.

But—and this he says he took from Derrida too, who wrote a book called Archive Fever—he thought it was essential, if the movement wanted to have some degree of control over how it was recorded and interpreted by historians, to collect their own documents. “So I was like, we have to have our own house, and if we’re going to talk about creating our own history, doing all this stuff ourselves, we have to have our own archives. So I was like, all right, let’s do it.”

“The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives.” — Michelle Dean, The Awl

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Sady Doyle: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Sady Doyle is a writer and the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown

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There is no slogan more misunderstood, or more widely abused, than “the personal is political.” This phrase was one of the most transformative ideas to emerge from second-wave feminism, or from the 20th century. It’s the underpinning assumption of all my own work. What it means is this: You take the most intimate, difficult, unseemly moments from your own life. You look to see if anyone else has experienced anything like them. You look for what you have in common with those people — your gender, your socioeconomic status, your career, your race. And then, you speak about what that means for the world. 

“The personal is political” is how the unspeakable, “private” issues of women—the men in the radical protest group who made rape jokes, the arrogant dismissals at the mostly-boy punk rock shows, the boss who made weird sexual comments, the date who raped you, the husband who beat you—became political concerns. It’s how “my problem” becomes “our problem.” It’s the catalyst for bringing marginalized experiences to light, and for finally understanding that it’s not happening because of who you are; it’s happening because of what you are, and that is something else entirely. Something which all of the people in your “what” have a vested interest in changing. 

“The personal is political” is also, I eventually came to realize, the essential factor in all of the essays I remembered from 2011. The pieces I’ve chosen are all about personal matters, in one way or another, and they all address huge social problems by focusing on one woman’s specific experience. They all raise questions without easy answers: About the identity of the reporter, and how that plays a role in what he or she reports; about whether personal responses to trauma can be evaluated in political terms; about how our identities come into conflict, and how to create a workable solidarity; about who we are, who we think we are, and who we would like others to think we are, and what the distance between those three things might be. In every case, I was struck by the author’s candor, bravery, and willingness to say some very uncomfortable things in public. And in every case, these pieces—and the reactions to them—taught me something new about how to see the world. 

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“Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire,” Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone 

Kirsten Ostrenga was a lonely, home-schooled fourteen-year-old who started a MySpace page to connect with people. Four years later, she was receiving daily messages calling her things along the lines of “rape-enjoying pathetic bitch,” she was receiving other messages from middle-aged men who wanted to fuck her, she was being impersonated online by dozens of people, she had her house vandalized, she had her cat disappear shortly after someone threatened to kill it, she had been punched in the face by a “fan” posing for a picture with her, she had been raped, and she had been publicly called a “murderer” in connection with the death of her rapist, who tripped and fell while fleeing the police who were there to arrest him for raping Kirsten. That rapist also happened to be her first boyfriend. They’d met through MySpace. 

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about all this is harrowing and astonishingly empathetic; the month it came out, I read it about ten or fifteen times. It’s not only about “Internet bullying,” or sexual violence, or even Kirsten Ostrenga; it’s also about the difficult-to-measure, often profound distance between Internet persona and person, and what we hope to find by making our lives public. Read it, and see if your voice doesn’t sound a little quieter the next time you go to write a snippy blog post about some public figure—if you don’t find yourself pulling certain punches, or asking whether you really know, or can ever know, what they’re actually going through at the moment. There are a lot of big magazine articles about Young People And The Internet. This year, no one did it better than Sabrina Rubin Erdely. 

“‘I Can Handle It:’ On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability,” Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, Feministe 

and

“I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” Mac McClelland, GOOD 

I always think of these two pieces as connected to each other, so that’s how I recommend you read them. They’re both about violence, and the ways that violence can change you. They’re both painful to read. And they’re both notable for being comprised of about ten separate things that female journalists, or feminists, are never supposed to say in public. Whitefield-Madrano writes about visiting the emergency room, after her boyfriend beat her up, with blood streaming down her face. “The only words that make sense are the ones that spill out of my mouth over and over again,” she says, “the only words that will let the receptionist and the nurses and my friends and my parents know that this isn’t what it looks like, that I’m not one of those women, those women in abusive relationships, those women who can’t help themselves enough to get out: I went to college, I went to college, I went to college.” Meanwhile, McClelland leads with “It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint,” and goes on from there.

Whitefield-Madrano was a feminist who organized Take Back the Night marches, published op-eds criticizing “the notion that a woman’s greatest personal threat lay outside the home,” and stayed in her relationship after her boyfriend started to hit her. McClelland was a human rights journalist whose job was to faithfully witness the pain of others; after being threatened with rape in Haiti, and witnessing the aftermath of severe sexual violence, she contracted post-traumatic stress disorder and needed her ex-boyfriend to simulate a rape with her as part of her recovery. Both women focus, to a large degree, on the internal aftereffects of the trauma. McClelland gagged and vomited, cried constantly, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop drinking. Whitefield-Madrano missed work, forgot her own phone number, moved in a permanent daze: “I’d been depressed before, and this was different. This was a fog of having no idea who I was, where I’d gone, or if I might return.” 

And they both produced astonishingly skilled, un-self-indulgent pieces of writing out of those experiences. (This was particularly easy to miss in the backlash to McClelland’s piece, which ranged from legitimate concerns—her representation of Haiti, her treatment of sources—to publishing her ex-boyfriend’s full name and place of employment, calling her a “geisha,” and claiming that she was somehow faking her PTSD to get attention and/or a book deal.) The experiences of trauma, abuse and post-traumatic stress are often literally impossible to describe. The very nature of what they call an “acute stress response”—“a feeling of detachment, disorientation, inability to concentrate or respond sensibly;” “the mind ‘going blank’;” “the person appears to be out of contact with others but is not unconscious;” these are symptoms, which sound fairly mild until you realize (as I once did, in my own experience of traumatic shock) that the strange hollow object by the metal basin is a cup, and is intended to hold water, which is why it is by the sink, and that you have been figuring this out for twenty minutes, ever since you set the cup down there—induces a fundamental disconnect from language. McClelland and Whitefield-Madrano plunge us into that experience with their nightmarish descriptions, but they also analyze it in lucid detail. It’s a remarkable achievement: Two clear, rational, coherent accounts of what it’s like to lose coherence, clarity, and reason.  

“SO REAL IT HURTS: Notes on Occupy Wall Street,” Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Facebook (republished at Racialicious)

For about a month this fall, every single professional journalist who cared about social justice or protest in any way whatsoever was busy writing or filing their Pieces On Occupy Wall Street. None of us wrote a better piece than Manissa McCleave Maharawal, who initially posted this on her personal, semi-private Facebook page. 

Covering protests is tricky. You don’t want to undermine or demonize them by reporting the wrong scenes or speaking to the wrong people. You don’t want to gloss over their problems by ignoring the less flattering facts on the ground. You don’t always know, frankly, whether you are there to report or support, and depending on what happens to you—as in the case of the writers who went to Occupy Wall Street to protest, and wound up filing pieces about getting arrested; or, the other writers who went to report, and wound up being victimized by the police like any other protester—that role can change within the space of an hour. 

And I will be even more frank with you: In the early weeks of Occupy Wall Street, I sometimes felt that I was seeing a lot of supporting, and not always enough reporting. It was communal, it was wonderful, it was revolutionary, absolutely no-one was smoking any pot whatsoever because that was a right-wing lie, everyone was so equal, etc. It was usually only on the smaller blogs that you could find stories like McCleave Maharawal’s: Men “dancing up on” women at drum circles without consent, radical activists responding to education about gender pronouns with outright bafflement, people of color being told to direct their concerns to someone’s email inbox rather than bringing them up at General Assembly, a man including a line about there being “one race, the human race, formerly divided by race, class,” etc., in the promotional materials, and responding to objections (namely that we were hardly “formerly” divided on those fronts) with “[it’s] scientifically true.” McCleave Maharawal was not “just” writing a personal essay; she was performing a public service, by giving people a genuinely nuanced view of the occupation. But this is not an anti-Occupy piece. It is not an attack piece. And it is not an example of undermining. Precisely because she was willing to cover the gritty and sometimes unflattering details of how solidarity was actually being worked out among “the 99%” at Occupy Wall Street, McCleave Maharawal actually wrote a far more convincing and meaningful argument for it than I had yet read. It’s a model for anyone who wants to advocate—for a cause, for a community, for a protest, for an idea—without slipping into boosterism; for anyone who wants to speak about the facts on the ground, without losing sight of what those facts really mean. 

“With The Ladies In The Back At An Odd Future Show,” Emma Carmichael, The Awl

2011 was, in many ways, the Year Of Unpleasant Conversations About Odd Future. The group just brings up a lot of sticky subjects: The relationship between art and artist, the relationship between creation and social responsibility for what one has created, the white fear of black masculinity, men’s disregard for violence against women. And, you know what? Those conversations were just as unpleasant for me as they were for you. I don’t exactly look forward to having any of them again. 

But, if I ever teach that long-imagined seminar on Journalism, Pop Culture, and Gender, I think our final assignment is going to consist of a 10-page paper on the difference between two short passages in two reviews of the exact same show: Amos Barshad’s “Odd Future Live Show Surpasses the Hype,” for Rolling Stone, and Emma Carmichael’s “With the Ladies In The Back at an Odd Future Show,” for The Awl. In fact, let’s just do that now. Better one? 

At one point, a fresh-faced blond girl roughly the same age as Tyler landed on the stage and accosted him for a kiss; he complied, wondered aloud if he might now have herpes and then tossed her off, too.

Or better two? 

[Just] after two in the morning, a blonde girl surfed her way onstage and kissed Tyler, who announced, “I might legit have herpes.” The crowd laughed and started a “show your titties” chant, and she refused, looking bashful. “Then get the fuck off the stage!” Tyler yelled. 

Class: Which of these passages was written by a man? How can you tell? Which writer made note of whether the girl in question was attractive (“fresh-faced”), and how do you think cultural norms around gender, presentation and gaze affected this choice? What is the difference between “accosted [Tyler]” and “kissed Tyler;” who is portrayed as an aggressor in each of these passages, how does it differ between passages, and what does that mean? Why did both writers choose to describe the girl as “blonde,” and which cultural narratives are supported by that choice? Would your answer be different if the writers substituted “white” for “blonde?” How? Do you think Amos Barshad joined in the “show us your titties” chant? If not, why didn’t he tell us that it happened? Are you really angry right now? At whom, and why, and what does that tell you? Please remember to demonstrate in your response that the personal is political. Papers due whenever you think you know what all of this means, and can say it. I might never turn mine in. 

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Writer Steve Silberman: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Steve Silberman is a contributing editor for Wired magazine, one of Time‘s selected science tweeters, and the author of the NeuroTribes blog at the Public Library of Science. He is currently working on a book about autism and neurodiversity for Avery/Penguin. (Read recent Longreads by Silberman here.)

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After years of predictions from pundits that the migration of media to the Web and mobile devices would mean shorter and shallower stories aimed at a juvenilized readership incapable of sustained attention, I’m delighted to report that we’re in a renaissance of long-form writing. This has been made possible, in part, by insightful curators like Maria Popova (@brainpicker) and Mark Armstrong (@longreads), who point their readers to the best of the best, daily, on Twitter. Now what’s required are ways for freelancers and bloggers to earn the money they need to support this level of in-depth reporting and discursive exploration. Here are five pieces from 2011 that really stuck with me.

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• Sy Montgomery, “Deep Intellect: Inside the Mind of an Octopus” (Orion Magazine

• Carl Zimmer, “The Human Lake” (his blog, The Loom)

• Julia Bascom, “Quiet Hands,” (her blog, Just Stimming)

• Alexis Madrigal, “A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful” (The Atlantic)

Michael Hall, “Falling Comet: The Last Days of Bill Haley” (Texas Monthly)

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This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between Lasn and White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that “America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was “very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme… . I think we should make this happen.” He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.

“No. 1 is best,” Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.

“Pre-Occupied.” — Mattathias Schwartz, New Yorker

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Graeber’s arguments place him squarely at odds with mainstream economic thought, and the discipline has, for the most part, ignored him. But his timing couldn’t be better to reach a popular audience. His writing provides an intellectual frame and a sort of genealogy for the movement he helped start. The inchoate anger of the Occupy Wall Street protesters tends to cluster around two things. One is the influence of money in politics. The other is debt: mortgages, credit-card debt, student loans, and the difference in how the debts of large financial companies and those of individual borrowers have been treated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street.” — Drake Bennett, Bloomberg Businessweek

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